AOpen AK86-L UPDATE: Uncommonly Good

AOpen is the components division of Acer, the huge company that has their hand in many consumer electronics markets. They produce motherboards, chipsets with their ALI brand, optical drives, displays, memory, and on and on. AOpen has produced motherboards for AMD processors almost from the time they were first introduced. Over the years, they have produced some very solid and interesting boards, but AOpen has never been very clear or consistent in their marketing direction. In the past year, AOpen produced some interesting boards for Intel chipsets and they have once again targeted the Enthusiast market. I say "once again" because AOpen seems to shift between hot and cold regarding whether or not the Enthusiast market matters to their sales. In the past, there have been some remarkably well-designed boards that were "almost there". In most cases, however, AOpen stopped short in development to truly raise the products to outstanding.

The AK86-L is AOpen's first Athlon 64 motherboard, supporting the mainstream Socket 754 processor and using the VIA K8T800 chipset. AOpen also produces the AK89 Max, which is based on the nVidia nForce3-150 chipset. While there are several models listed in both the AK86 and AK89 families, these two models are the only two that we have actually seen for sale. The "L" in the AK86-L means that Gigabit LAN is included.