UN-Official AOPEN AK86-L Motherboard Thread

[rstove02]

Since this board got a gold editors choice award wanted to know what others think of the board.

Bought mine a week ago and for the first 4 days the system was soild as a rock. Not a single reboot, freeze or hiccup with the following hardware:
(1) 512MB Corsair PC3200 memory stick
(2) 120GB 8MB buffer hard drives
(1) floppy drive
(1) DVD/CDR combo drive
Gainward FX5600 video card
350Watt ATX power supply

On the fifth day it all went to heck. While playing Freelancer (yes it's kinda dated for a AMD64 system) system rebooted. When reboot occured I think I heard a slight popping sound or maybe it was a little death scream comming from the internal speaker could never figure out where it came from.

After that, within a maximum of 60 seconds from boot the video signal quits from the system, the hard drive light goes soild and the reset and power buttons go unresponsive. Only way to reboot is virtually "pull the plug".

All components (memory, video card, power supply, drives) came from my old XP 2400+ system are working fine. In fact I am writing this with my old motherboard (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe) with the same components and everything is rock solid, albeit slower now. Only leaves the motherboard or the CPU as the culprit.

Unplugged my drives, reset the BIOS, has a priest excercise any demons in the system to no avail. System freezes at evey boot up, so far it has frozen at the following places:
1) At windows log in screen
2) While operating windows
3) While booting from a floppy
4) While browsing the BIOS
5) Before the single POST beep from the BIOS

At the times I was able to access the hardware monitor in the BIOS screen before the next freeze, was able to monitor CPU temps. Never was past 45C. In fact during the first 4 days during heavy load, motherboard monitor never recorded it going past 50C. That combined with the fact that CPUs tend to be an all-or-nothing device (in other words if the CPU is broken no way in hell windows would be getting to the logon screen) think that leaves out the CPU.

Visually inspected the motherboard and CPU. No burn spots, no blown/leaking capacitors, no acrid smell.....nothing. Wound up RMA'ing the motherboard to the vendor for a replacement one, thank goodness Newegg.com has a good rating. Not too mad about it since I still have my old motherboard/CPU to use till the replacement arrives. Just hope that it is not a reoccuring issue with their boards.

Anyone get this board...and what are your comments on it.

 

[cowdog]

Not the same board, but maybe related...

I have the nForce3 150 AOpen board (the AK89 Max), and although it is seems to be a good board for the money (paid less than $100), I have had intermittent video, network adaptor, and generic stability problems that are starting to nag at me. I have not overclocked this board for over a month now, and it is sometimes marginally stable at stock settings. I have switched out power supply, ram, and video card, tried different drivers, and reinstalled, etc. I am not sure I can say that I have a bad board, but I wouldn't say I have a good board. Maybe it is simply a driver issue or something that a bios update can cure. Overall, it is like having a low grade fever; just enough to notice but not enough to really make you change your day. I wasvery pleased with this board at first even though I experienced some of these issues from day 1. I simply expected that the little problems were things I would figure out as I went along. That hasn't happened.

BTW, the bios is also a sore point with me. I really don't like having the watchdog feature lock the bios for trivial changes. When it locks, it requires clearing CMOS. It is like an overprotective parent, and I don't want an overprotective parent. Save that stuff for Dells.

Unfortunately I haven't found AOpen very customer service oriented. Maybe I'm just falling through the cracks or something. At this point I wouldn't buy an AOpen mobo again, nor would I recommend one. Of course my n is only 1, and there can be bad boards from any manufacturer. Maybe I'm just having random, coincidental bad luck with the mobo and in my attempts to communicate with AOpen and get some answers. I just wish I could get AOpen to respond to my multiple inquiries via multiple formats. We'll see how it all works out.

I hope you figure out your AK86-L. If you end up working with AOpen I hope you have better luck than I am having.

 

[rstove02]

Oh forgot to mention AOpen's customer service in my original post. AOpen has a tech support group called Dr Open where you can send them problems about your motherboard and receive their help on getting it fixed.

Bascially in my letter to them I sent them the same information I put in my post in this thread. So far I got one email from them asking the following questions:

A. During power-up the system in booting process, is it freeze or reboot the system when only loading the operating system?
B. Kindly help Sir to verify your system booting process using only the bootable disk inserted to your floppy drive if it can be able to boot-up from A:\ prompt without any problem. (Temporarily removed the IDE1 and IDE2 devices)
C. Is it also fresh installed of operating system using AK86-L motherboard model with the HDD drive and above devices combination?

I can understand the tech guy at AOpen asking question C since I did not cover it, but I answered questions A and B already in my initial report I gave them. Did kind of miff me have to repeat information to them. Have yet to hear anything else from them.

 

[rstove02]

Late update, new board arrived and been running with it for over a month with no problems. Seems that other people have been having problems with video signal winking out with the AK86-L.