The layout
The AK31 board isn't huge, but it's large enough to fit its bounty of expansion options and still remain fairly roomy. The layout is conventional for a mid-sized ATX board, without too many surprises. There are a few nice touches, and one annoyance.

Notice a few things about the AK31's layout:

• As you can see, the AK31 packs an active cooler for the KT266 north bridge chip, to aid stability and help the chip better tolerate overclocking.

• The CPU socket's orientation is "right," in that the tabs to hold on the cooler point to the front and rear of the board. Mobos with tabs that point left-right on the board make attaching a fussy cooler a chore, because access to one of the tabs—the one on the board's edge—will probably be blocked by the power supply in most ATX cases. On the AK31, you may have to remove a DIMM, but you can get to both sides of the socket.

• The AGP slot is surrounded by a black brace to hold in the video card. The AGP card snaps into the brace, which keeps the card in place when the monitor cable gets jerked around.

• There's an absolute forest of green capacitors on behind the CPU socket. If you equate lots of big capacitors with stability and goodness, the AK31 will satisfy your longing.

• The ATX power connector is far enough away from the CPU (and everything else) that it doesn't impede access. Nice placement, that.

Despite the catalog of observations above, I wouldn't consider myself a mobo layout fetishist like some folks. However, I've dealt with enough mobos to know what annoys me, and the AK31 avoids a lot of the pitfalls.

There is one problem with the layout, though. I think the picture below illustrates it clearly.

As with Shuttle's AV32, reviewed here, the AK31's AGP slot and DIMM slots meet up a little too close for comfort. In the AV32 review, I had this to say about this arrangement:

There's really no excuse for this sort of problem in this day and age. It's not a huge problem once the system's built, but having to pull your AGP card to swap out some RAM is just wrong.

Little did I know at the time there are two really good excuses. First, there are the constraints of the ATX spec. If you want to put the DIMM slots anywhere near the CPU (and believe me, you do), they pretty much have to go about where they are on the AK31. Ditto for the AGP slot. The second excuse is one for the ages: "everybody's doing it." I got hold of a brand-new motherboard from Intel recently, and it has the same problem. I still don't like it, though. Just a teensy bit more room between the DIMM slot tabs and the AGP card would make a huge difference.