AOpen has made great inroads into the European marketplace in the last few years and is now supplying everything from CD-writers to computer cases. The AK73 Pro is the company's latest motherboard and is aimed at the high-end user. Compared with entry-level boards, it adds more advanced features, like an UltraDMA/ATA-100 interface and the ability to support processor over-clocking.

Based, as are all the boards in this test, around the AMD Athlon processor, the AK73 Pro uses VIA's KT133 north bridge chipset and the VT686B south bridge, enabling it to use AMD's 200MHz FSB, but not the faster 266MHz variant.

The motherboard layout is standard, with the cable connections at the front, making it easy to connect hard drives and floppy drives. AOpen has done away with any old 16-bit connections on the bus, so you have five PCI slots and a 4x AGP slot for your graphics card. The most distinctive feature on the board is the gold plated heat sink on the support chipset. This is claimed to improve heat dissipation, but we think it just looks good.

The board also includes a high level of system monitoring to prevent overheating and protect the processor. The BIOS has a built in firewall feature and dual BIOS switching. If you get in trouble or damage the chip, it's possible to switch over to the other, which is a cunning idea given how easy it is for a flash upgrade to go wrong and render a board unusable.

Surprisingly, the AOpen board comes with a copy of Norton AntiVirus in addition to the necessary driver tools. All in all, this is a good package at a reasonable price.

For the full specification of this board, see the Features table.