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The Aopen board is fairly standard board but with quite a lot in the package. as well as the board you get a good deal of software to keep your machine healthy. You get a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2003, plus a system restore (EzRestore), plus a flash utility and Adobe Acrobat Reader. This board also contains Serial ATA and Serial ATA RAID along with the normal ATA 133 connections. This gives you great scope for adding hard drives and more, providing you have the space and a decent power supply :). 5 PCI Slots should be enough to keep you expanders happy. Room for all your bits and pieces. Quite surprisingly a good board for overclocking although the name Aopen doesn't normally fit into the overclocking category. Very solid and a worthy buy. nForce 2 Ultra 400 Nvidia's new revision of their Nforce 2 as you would expect has been tweaked a little to provide better performance and better support for the latest CPU's. I am referring here to the Athlon XP Barton core. This Chipset supports all the current FSB speeds from 100Mhz for the the Duron all the way to 200Mhz for the top end Barton CPU's. Its also Dual Data Rate so the effective Bus speeds can be anything up to 400Mhz. Hence the name Ultra-400. Motherboard Features
AGP 8x Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything. DDR400 The current fastest memory available DDR400. DDR400 also known as PC3200. DDR400 provides a 200Mhz*2 memory system. Remember the days of PC100. Only 2 banks of DDR400 can be used though with a max of 2Gb. Should really be enough though. Only problem is that without upgrade you wont be able to go beyond 2Gb without using the slower memory. No problem for anyone other than people looking to run a network server or something similar. The Abit NF7-S uses a Dual DDR400 system which incorporates two independent memory controllers USB 2.0 USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.
In terms of features and extra's this is one of the better nForce 2-400 Ultra boards. It has a wide range of software to keep your PC running healthy and plenty of room for component expansion in both PCI slots and ATA connectors. Just a couple of minor issues though, Firstly Aopen have gone with the idea of standing the battery on its side, although this is nothing derogatory to the performance it can be a little tricky to work around so you have to be careful when working near it, so that you don't snap it off. Secondly the nForce Northbridge only has a passive heatsink cooler on it, where as most have opted for an active cooler. Shouldn't be a problem, but keeping the case well ventilated should be a priority as you don't want anything unexpected to happen. On the plus side the life of the AK79D-400 Max is protected by a second BIOS should the first one fail. Aopen surprised us with its overclocking ability even if memory timings and some voltage settings had to be changed, in order to keep the system stable. Take a look in the links section below for Toms benchmarks. Conclusion a good solid package with a bit of something for everyone. Useful Links
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