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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on January 21, 2002
Manufactured by: Shuttle
Product: AK35GTR
KT266a Socket A motherboard
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low Motherboard
prices here.
The board was on the whole sensibly laid
out. The DIMM slots are high up enough not to interfere with
AGP card insertion or removal, although doing this itself is
a challenge. The AGP card can click into place easily, but
to be removed you have to be nimble-fingered. Still, I am
nitpicking since changing AGP cards is usually something
that is done no more than bi-annually for most users, and
safeguarding against the AGP card popping out during
computer usage is surely far more important than making AGP
cards easy to remove. And as a bonus the Chassis fan
connector was near enough the AGP port to serve the three
pinned fan I have on my GeForce
2.
The CPU socket does have several
capacitors to one side of it, but thankfully they do not
pose an obstacle to installing even the largest heatsink.
The ATX power connector can also be found in this area. It
is high up enough on the board so that the power loom does
not drag over the heatsink, at least in my case, but I can
easily foresee this happening in other cases. Installing
Peripheral Component Interface components was not without
issue. The connectors for the extra two USB ports and the
connector for the LFE/Centre channel jack were obscure, and
required me to take out the PCI cards before they could be
used, and also their location was less than desirable,
causing the wires to drape over PCI cards, depending on
where you want the backing plates located.
Having a look through the BIOS was as
expected, and although the rather retrospective layout and
options of the setup were rather off-putting (i.e. Gate A20,
BIOS shadows..), there was essentially nothing really wrong
with the setup at all. In fact it did have a rather good
overclocking section, allowing FSB overclocking up to
200(400)Mhz DDR, 67Mhz more than the current limit of
current Athlon CPUs. This means the memory can be driven at
up to 233(466)Mhz, allowing, theoretically, for up to PC700,
more on this later. The CPU core voltage can be adjusted,
too, from 1.1 up to 2.3 volts, more than enough for most
overclockers, especially when the default voltage for Athlon
XP processors is 1.75. Just make sure your power supply is
up to the power requirements (or else the current might drop
substantially). Memory can also be adjusted, with values
from 2.55 to 2.7, although personally I wouldn't want to put
use the latter setting without the presence of active
cooling, and for the cost of implementing that on memory I
could have got a better CPU giving greater performance
boost. Still, the option remains.
Additionally I was impressed with the
safeguards Shuttle implemented. Unlike many other boards,
where if the fan fails your CPU is all but doomed, Shuttle
have a customizable temperature warning and threshold,
eminently useful. You can set the warning to appear when the
CPU reaches anywhere from 50 to 70 degrees Celsius, and set
the system to shut down when the CPU reaches 60 to 75
degrees Celsius. This, in my opinion, is much more efficient
than "Fan off control", as seen on Soyo's Dragon
Plus. Intel has had this system for a long time, and its a
welcome inclusion on an AMD system.
Shuttle didn't include any
form of heat protection on the board I was sent, so if the cooling fails there is a
good chance that you will see your CPU burn, if it is a
"classic" Thunderbird Athlon at least, they might
be able to include this on the final revision of the board
however. Newer
Athlon XP CPUs do not generally generate as much heat. I
have left mine unattended for at least an hour after the
Black Label fan I was using failed, and the system was still
very much active, albeit with the CPU temperature at eighty
degrees Celsius. I wouldn't like to think about how it
affected the lifetime of the processor though.
Quite a rare thing happened the first
time I booted the system up; it started perfectly first
time. Drivers were installed, and after a reboot everything
was working as best as could be expected. Well, almost. The
problem that dogged my use of the motherboard was the
keyboard. Most of the time when I booted into windows the
keyboard would simply not work on the PS/2 port. It required
that disconnect it then reconnect it. It would then work
normally, but if I restarted the system the exact same
problem would occur. From this I can deduce that it is not
simply a problem with a loose connection; it is something
fundamentally wrong with the system (presumably the BIOS).
Perhaps future bios upgrades could fix this.
The AK35GT-R includes RAID support for
mirroring or striping, and also (unlike competitors),
spanning. I was unable to test this, but the RAID setup
utility seems straightforward enough, as does the windows
software employed (supplied on the drivers CD). The
connectors can also theoretically be used as surplus UDMA
connectors, although it was a little overcomplicated, and I
was happy to stick with just using the integrated UDMA
controller.
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