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Introduction

Hot on the heels of our review of AOpen's AK79-D 400 Max, we take a look at a sibling, the AK77-600 Max. The AK77 is based on the KT-600 chipset. VIA has been able to close the performance gap between the Nforce2 and their KT based chipsets. They still seem to have quite a bit of a price advantage as all manufacturers building KT-600 boards seem to also build nforce2 ones also.

As mentioned before, the nforce2 is more of an enthusiast based board as it overclocks better and has more options than the KT based ones and unfortunately this trend continues as we will see later. The AK77-Max does have its strong points though and without further delay, let's delve into the specs -

Specifications

Support 400MHz FSB AMD Athlon XP CPU
Support DDR400
Support ATA133 IDE Interface
EzColor Color Coding System
Gigabit LAN on-board
IEEE 1394 on-board
Support AGP 8X
Support RAID function (Port 1,2: RAID 0, 1, 0+1 supported; Port 3,4: RAID 0, 1 supported)
Serial ATA on-board
CPU Jumper-less Design
EzClock -- Overclocking is fun!
1MHz Stepping CPU Overclocking
Adjustable CPU Vcore through BIOS
Adjustable AGP Voltage
Adjustable Memory Voltage
Large Low ESR Capacitors
WatchDog ABS -- Intelligent Overclocking Anti-lock Break System
AGP Protection Technology
AMD CPU Over Heat Protection (OHP)
CPU Over Current Protection (OCP)
Hardware Monitoring
SilentTek Noise Reduction Technology
SilentBIOS Noise Reduction Technology
Chassis Intrusion Detector
Resetable Fuse for Keyboard and USB
AC Power-On Auto Recovery
Battery-less & Long-life Design
Dr Voice II
Dr LED Debug Tool (optional module)
Vivid BIOS Technology
EzWinFlash BIOS
Multi-Language WinBIOS Technology
Support DMI management under Windows
EzRestore/ProMagic HDD Crash Protection
Suspend to Disk (ACPI S4)
Suspend to RAM (ACPI S3)
BIOS Virus Protection
DieHard BIOS (2nd Flash ROM included)
DieHard BIOS Lite
AOpen Black Pearl PCB
Full Colored Easy Installation Guide
Online eBook User Manual
AOpen Bonus Pack CD
Norton Anti-Virus CD included