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Conclusions

The full feature set of the AK77 600 Max can rival nearly any board in the market right now with SATA, IDE RAID, Firewire, a Dual Bios and SilentTek. However there are several factors that make the AK77 a less than compelling buy for the enthusiast. First and foremost are the problems with overclocking. This is not just a dig at the AK77 but applies to the entire KT600 chipset. The FSB adjustment ceiling is a very bad idea. The problem is compounded by the fact that the PCI and AGP buses are not locked. So when a user does not run at a 133 / 166 or 200 mhz FSB, the PCI/AGP bus will be out of spec. The artificial limits on the FSB prevent chips of a lower stepping from reaching a higher one (eg- 133 mhz chips will not be allowed to run at more than 160 mhz). This forces the user to run their components out of spec. I do not know the rationale behind the ceiling but it was an issue of protecting the end user, it does more harm than good. The soft multiplier change works on the AK77 also, just not very well. It would refuse to boot at several multiplier locks and the ones that we were able to get it to successfully boot at resulted in Prime95 errors.

A bright point with the AK77 and other AOpen products is SilentTek. In this age of high RPM fans and CDroms that scream when they spin up, it shows that AOpen really knows what features that end users want. SilentTek can control both fan speed (based on temperature) and can also limit the speed of the CDrom so that it will not spin up to the maximum speed (therefore suppressing the noise). As was mentioned earlier, the manual levels for the temperature vs fan settings works the best but other than that SilentTek works as advertised and will be worth keeping an eye on as it matures further especially with the automatic settings.

Another problem is the AK77 lags behind significantly in benchmarks. Its brethren, the AK79-D runs quite a bit faster while the Gigabyte KT600 solution leads the pack. The performance of the AK77 needs to improve a lot to remain competitive with other AMD based solutions.

The AK77 is a good board for the average user because of its full feature set and as long as top performance and overclocking are not issues, it is worth your consideration. For the enthusiast crowd though it is hard to recommend this board because of some significant faults.

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