Originally posted by VidmanII
AOpen products have traditionally been very stable and user friendly. Here's a review of the AK79D-400 Max.......
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm? ... 439&page=1
From what I see the major differences are that the Aopen only goes to up 1.85v Vcore, 2.8v on the memory. Abits NF7-S voltage selections have more headroom. 2.0v+ Vcore, 2.9v memory.
Here's some of the features on the AOpen......
The AK79D-400 includes Serial ATA/Serial ATA RAID, an additional Ultra/133 IDE channel, 5.1 audio (nVIDIA SoundStorm - the good stuff!), IEEE 1394, 10/100 LAN and dual BIOS's.
From what I see if you want to do some moderate OCing and want the dual BIOS, the AOpen would be an excellent choice. While I like the inclusion of the passive HS on the southbridge, you'd think by now that mobo mfgrs would have active cooling on the northbridge. The Abit does but the AOpen doesn't.
For hardcore OCing, I think the NF7-S is probably the better choice.
Yeah, I like the Dual Bios feature as well. Not planing on any extreme OC-ing at the moment (I'd like to learn a little more before I jump into OC). Only the "EZ Clock" thing on the Aopen board seems (this is just my layman impression) a lot more user friendly then the "Softmenu" that Abit uses. I'm not surre if that matters or not.
I like the Soundstrom (as I'm using onboard sound) and passive sinks too. It is possible to buy an active cooler for the northbridge in any case though, yes? Only I thought the Abit board has Soundstrom or at least that is what I read...
Abit's Site lists it as MCP-T +SPP. <-- Not Nvida soundstrom, wha?
From what I can get at
Aopen's site they list the chipset as MCP-T as well.
Serial ATA is nice bonus, but I won't be doing that for a while. Nice to have the option though. Firewire is on both boards, which is great because I plan on using my camera and stuff. I suppose it's not that big a deal since you can buy a PCI IEEE card. Again, nice to have the feature though.
I'm buying my mainboard at the local PC shop, just in case anything goes bad, it's doa or what-not, I can take it back which is more convenient then RMA-ing it back to Newegg.com or Directron (<-- awesome site!). I'm trying to do my homework before I start this thing. Thanks.
Edit: Just for arguments sake, I was looking at the Abit rev. 2.0 as I heard it is very much improved over the first few versions. I'm not sure what ver. the Aopen board is, if that makes any difference.