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Introduction

Around the time of the Athlon XP release, a new player entered the AMD motherboard market. Surprisingly it was graphics giant Nvidia who had recently finished the design of a chipset for Microsoft's Xbox. The initial Nforce chipset was cooly received due to numerous and lengthy delays as well as its inability to live up to the hype surrounding it. VIA the main player on the block must have felt pretty good about the competing KT333 and KT400 at the time. All that changed though with the release of the Nforce2. Suddenly, Nvidia was a force in the Athlon market and VIA fell quickly behind. The KT600 bridged the performance gap somewhat but the relatively poor overclocking potential of the KT600 helped Nvidia establish a firm grip on the Athlon XP market in its waning days.

On the eve of the release of the Athlon 64, there were only two contenders in the motherboard market, VIA with the P8T800 and Nvidia with the Nforce3 150. Nvidia stumbled a bit here, going with a barebones single chip solution while VIA went the fancier route. What do we mean by a barebones solution? The K8T800 provides an integrated SATA RAID controller and audio is also supported through the south bridge while the Nforce 3 150 requires extra chips for audio, SATA and RAID, making the Nforce 3 a lot more expensive to produce. Another blemish against Nvidia was a slower HyperTransport spec compared to the VIA board. Because of these two issues, a lot of manufacturers seem to have been more reluctant in developing Nforce 3 based boards.

Today we take a look at the first K8T800 based board to make it into our office, AOpen's AK86-L. The K8T800 has been the chipset of choice for most manufacturers having a much wider range of support compared to the NForce 3. Having taken a look at a quite a few AOpen products in the last few months including a couple of cases and their excellent EZ65 Cube we are excited about the AK89-L. Those looking for a budget Athlon 64 solution may want to keep an eye out on this board because it comes in at a very low price point. We'll take a quick look at the specs before we examine the board a little closer.