DFI AK76-SN
Board Revision: A
BIOS Version: 06/29/2001
Company Info
This year, DFI celebrates its 20 years anniversary. Today they belong to the Top 10 motherboard manufacturers. While they do quite a lot of OEM business, DFI also got a foot in the retail market some years ago. In Europe, their motherboards are popular due to attractive prices.
Hardware Features
The AK76-SN is a barebones motherboard with no special features. There are six PCI slots, AGP 4x, two DIMM sockets and VIA's 686B South Bridge providing UltraATA/100. The number of fan headers is exceptional: There are four of them available - not bad for a motherboard that looks very simple at the first view.
BIOS
DFI uses the standard Phoenix BIOS, just as everybody else except Asus. The positive news is that we could run our Crucial memory at the optimum memory timings, resulting in fast performance that puts the AK76-SN even above the two competitors of the last review .
Configuration And Manual
Though this motherboard does not have many soft set-up options except an item to alter the FSB speed, it is suitable for overclocking. On the image you can see two blue DIP blocks at the right edge. Here you can freely choose the multiplier (after closing the bridges on the CPU) and the core voltage.
DFI's manual includes English, German, French and Spanish. However, the trade-off is that it isn't as detailed as the manuals from Asus and Gigabyte.
Test & Performance
After manually changing the DDR timings from auto set-up to the ideal timings, the DFI motherboard performed significantly better. In all benchmarks the board is within the top 5.
Shipment
The motherboard box contains the manual, a driver CD, one 80-pin IDE and a floppy cable. DFI also includes a sticker with the board layout and jumper/DIP settings that can be posted inside your case in order to have the information handy.
