Related Articles

Layout & Appearance

The AK79D has an attractive black PCB with yellow IDE connectors and blue RAM slots. The color scheme works well and is not as gaudy as some boards from other manufacturers. The board layout is quite good. There is a lot of room around the CPU which means more options for those who want to mount a bigger heatsink and less chance of damaging some of the motherboard components if something slips. The socket also includes four mounting holes, something that may become more of a rarity as AMD has removed those from the official motherboard specs for XPs. There are quite a few boards from various manufacturers that have gone ahead and removed them coming as a bit of a blow to the enthusiast community. This has led to some rumblings from some large cooler companies and it will affect their product lines seeing as how we are already seeing as how their potential market segment shrink.

The IDE and floppy connectors are not placed in strange places so cabling length should not be an issue. The AK79D lacks a 12V connector found on all P4 boards and many AMD based ones.

Another small caveat is the inclusion of only 3 DIMM slots. Personally I have experienced some instability with all four DIMM slots populated on another nForce2 based board so it is not a big loss. The DIMM slots are a bit close to the AGP slot so removing the videocard may be necessary to add/remove RAM.

The back I/O panel is pretty standard with 2 PS2 ports, 4 USB1/2, 1 comm port, 1 parallel port, 1 lan port, and 3 audio connectors. It would have been nice for the external bracket to include more analog outputs that plug directly into speaker sets that take the 1/8" mini jacks instead of just SPDIF.

The northbridge is cooled by a large AOpen passive heatsink. It is not held in with the standard black pins but with a couple of tension wires that latch onto hooks. This will give modders a chance to put something a little bigger on with a bit of work. Notice that the AGP lock rentention system is sliding lock rather than a latch. It is something minor but latches are a bit tricky with larger cards such as the 5950s.