Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 1

AOpen does the Pentium 4

At the AOpen booth, they were showcasing pretty much what other manufacturers had at their booths, including Pentium 4 and DDR solutions.  Let’s start with their Pentium 4 motherboard.

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The above pictures are of the AX4T, supporting Pentium 4 processors of up to 1.5GHz, 512MB of RDRAM, and on-board audio and LAN.  Notice the four big silver “circles,”two on each side, around the CPU socket.  That’s where the Pentium 4’s retention mechanism is mounted.

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Besides the Intel Pentium 4 board, AOpen will also release the MK7A, which uses the AMD 761 North Bridge, supporting 200/266 MHz FSB AMD CPU’s and DDR SDRAM.  For the South Bridge, they will use the VIA 686A Super South Bridge to reduce costs.  The board will come in the micro-ATX form factor, but AOpen will release a standard ATX version of the board a bit later on.