AOpen AK73 Pro A Review

[Keefe]

Overclockers Online has kicked off their review of the AOpen AK73 Pro A motherboards which sports a black PCB and a silver Northbridge heatsink. But besides a pretty face, what else does this KT133A board have to offer?

The layout of the AK73Pro(A) is great. Nope, there's really nothing bad to say about this. The design is exactly the same as on the AK73Pro KT133 (non-A) board from AOpen. That probably saved them a lot of money while engineering the board.
Both IDE connectors as well as the floppy disk drive connector are on the right side of the board. The DIMMs are situated right next to the CPU socket (on the right side) and they are NOT blocking the AGP card in any way. What I really like about this board is that the ATX power connector is situated on the top edge of the board. This prevents the big fat PSU cable from hanging over the board and the CPU preventing the airflow in your case. There's plenty of space around the CPU socket expect maybe to the left side of the socket as the transistors are very close here, but normally you shouldn't have any problem installing a bigass HSF onto your CPU ... Apart from the nice black PCB and the expensive looking silver passive heatsink on the Northbridge, the layout of this board isn't much different from any other Socket A board on the market today.

AOpen AK73 Pro A Review