AOpen AK73 Pro Review

The AK73Pro(A) also comes with the now AOpen standard, silver colored heatsink. It seems a little strange to me that AOpen has chosen to brake from the norm here, by not going with an active cooling solution. One area where AOpen has finally jumped on the bandwagon with the rest of the OEM´s, is in the power supply plug placement. Where in the past it had appeared that it was the last thing the engineers placed on the PCB, where ever they could fit it, now they´ve finally placed it in a spot that at least will not interfere with your CPU´s HSF unit´s air flow. Some of the capacitors are a little close to the CPU socket, and it might take some effort to get some of the more unique HSF units attached. The IDE and floppy ports are all in decent locations, where they won´t interfere with full length AGP or PCI cards. The AGP port has a nice locking mechanism attached to it, to keep you LAN players from having to open your box and reseat your video card, or after you´ve dropped your system for the third time in fifteen minutes. There´s also an RPM monitoring fan header (total of three) in close proximity to the AGP port. A nice touch for those of us who like to void our warranties by attaching our own high performance HSF unit´s to our video cards.