AOPEN AK79G Max nForce2 (8)
Bluetooth 5 Mar 2003

After numerous BIOS updates, we finalised our review with BIOS ver 1.00D. It has been an experience reviewing this board as we had some performance issues with the initial beta bios. Performance was very bad with the beta bios and that resulted in the delay of this review as we await for a better BIOS.

In our test of AK79G Max, we already have an idea that the performance would be similar to the nForce2+SPP boards like the EPoX 8RDA+. We were quite skeptical about it initially because of the early bios that gave a results that is beyond our expectation (too low). In our test of BIOS 1.00D, we found that the system to be rock stable at default 166mhz fsb and even at overclocked fsb of 200Mhz (by forcing low multiplier using two pin trick). We used the Corsair TwinX pair of CAS 2, 2-2-5 RAMs for this test. Results we get are close to EPoX 8RDA+. It performs slightly slower in Q3 but it is outstanding in 3Dmark2001SE scoring a 100 points higher than EPoX 8RDA+. The results are quite consistent and it scales well. The only thing is that nForce2 chipset lost to SiS 746FX in terms of Disk Benchmarks which resulted in low scores for Content Creation WS and Business WS.

The AK79G Max has very nice feature set and they include thins like the on board SATA ports, LAN, TV out connector, 1394, 6 USB 2.0 (4 onboard + 2 through bracket). There is also software like WINBIOS (for changing parameters of BIOS in WIndows)and EZClock (for changing voltage/fsb in windows). There is also SilentTek and EzRestore which might come handy in our daily usage.

(Related Reviews/Galleries : SiS 746FX Ref Board, ECS L7S7A SiS746 Mainboard, Iwill K7S2 Gallery)

Discuss
Write to Editor

Pros 好处:

Innovation Award

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com