More Impressions

In the board you have two fan connectors present which is the minimum we could expect to have, its placement isn't ideal though. The first one is located very near to the CPU slot but the other one is far in the bottom area of the board, near the AMR slot, this could be matter of trouble if you're using any custom dual fan cooler.

Another thing I disliked of the board layout was the power connector placement, I thought all manufacturers were conscious that there is a lot of people using large heatsinks for better cooling and overclocking, well, at the end I couldn't use my Alpha cooler with the AK72.

Back to the good side of the things, it's impossible not to notice the large number of 2200uF low ESR capacitors located next to the CPU Slot, this is supposed to help CPU power stability on high frequency processors.

The AK72 comes with built-in audio, although it can be easily disabled via a jumper, we see this feature as another way of attracting OEMs since it makes the board more cost effective. Don't expect to have excellent audio quality or any kind of advanced API support such as EAX or A3D but just plain audio support which comes as an extra.

In the box I also found a cable with the front USB ports. Although most of the motherboards I've used recently had the option of connecting two additional USB ports, this might be the first time that I see the plate is included in the package, people with more than 2 USB devices will enjoy having this from the start.

Overclocking

For testing the AK72 overclocking capabilities and stability I used an Athlon 500 and Thunderbird 700 Slot A, results were just satisfactory.

With both processors I could get a few extra MHz by using a 105mhz FSB, that is 525mhz and 735mhz for each processor respectively, that is, using default voltage. In the case of the original Athlon I was able to push it a bit more but the system would crash immediately.

In order to get real overclocking, and with that I mean a speed boost you will actually notice, I had to use a Golden Finger device, notice however that made overclocking totally CPU independent so motherboard couldn't be a limiting factor. I got the Athlon running at 750mhz (it had a 650 core) and the Thunderbird at 800mhz.

Go to next page !