Tuesday, June 27, 2000

Additional features (continued)

Additional features of the AOpen AK72 include: Wake on LAN, Wake on Modem Ring, PS/2 connectors, 4 USB ports - two of which are located on the back panel, an integrated AC"97 sound-card, Power Failure Recovery, Suspend to Disk, Suspend to RAM, RX/TX connectors for infrared, and start-up from the keyboard/mouse/or at a pre-set time. Hardware monitoring of fan speeds, CPU temperature, and voltages is also included as a standard feature on this PC99-compliant motherboard.

Below, a photo of the AK72.

Click here to enlarge

Installation

Installing the AK72 is child's play, thanks to its jumperless design. Simply put the board in the casing, plug everything in, boot up, and make a quick trip through the BIOS to make any adjustments. Please note that this board is fairly large, and demands a similarly large casing.

The software bundle

The installation CD includes 4-in-1 patches from Via, a hardware monitoring utility, a program for flashing the BIOS, Adobe Acrobat Reader, an electronic version of the user's manual, and a bonus pack which includes Norton Antivirus, Norton Crashguard, and a very interesting utility called "Product Quality Assurance" which is composed of a series of benchmarks designed to test the system in order to make sure that everything is functioning properly.

The hardware bundle

The hardware that accompany the AK72, include: 2 ATA-66 IDE cables, a floppy disk cable, and a back panel bracket with USB connectors for adding 2 additional USB ports.

Next: The Tests