Introduction

It's been a while since we last heard from AOpen. Although they have been pretty quiet and less agressively involved in rolling out the greatest and latest motherboards for the DIY or OEM market, AOpen is nevertheless producing one quality product after another. Probably more laid back in this region, AOpen is a popular brand in other countries.

We received the AK77 Pro(A)-133 just recently and it is based on the VIA KT266A chipset. Although we now have KT333 in the market, not many would go for DDR333 as yet since DDR333 memory parts are rather expensive and not as readily available. In addition, the price of current KT333 motherboards are higher than boards based on the older chipset such as the KT266A. As a highly improved version of VIA's first attempt with DDR using the KT266, the KT266A chipset is among the very best DDR266 based chipset for the AMD Duron/Athlon series of CPUs.

So, the question is why would AOpen introduce new boards based on the older KT266A chipset? For one, it's the price and proven performance. The other reason is the new South Bridge which allows it to support new ATA 133 IDE drives. Pairing the KT266A with the new VT8233A South Bridge pushes the performance envelope a little more. Unfortunately, the new VT8233A South Bridge is still not able to support the new USB 2.0 standard.

Here's the specification of the motherboard :-