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Quality and Setup of the Shuttle AK37GTR |
| This
board won't give you the blues |
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Like
the aforementioned Soyo KT400 Dragon, the Shuttle
AK37GTR also
comes in a colored PCB, this time in a blue. A nice touch that
you won't be able to see in the pictures, is that just
about everything is clearly labeled in white
silkscreen print on the PCB,
making it a snap to find things when the manual isn't
handy.
Near the VT8325 South bridge, we found two
IDE
connections for ATA 66/100/133 set on the edge of the
board. Further along in the corner were two Serial
ATA connectors, as well as the yellow IDE RAID connectors,
set perpendicular to the airflow. These were controlled
by the nearly HPT 372 controller by Highpoint
Technologies.
Two extra USB
connectors were placed on the far side of the last PCI
slot that could be used with the provided bracket.
For expansion, there was an AGP 4x/8x slot,
which did not have any card retention provisions, and 5 PCI
2.2 slots. The audio connections, four of them to be
exact, were placed in the usually sparsely populated
area behind the I/O connections and to the right of
the AGP slot. This means no sneaking an audio cable
from the top of a tower to the front left corner of
the board. The header for the center/bass audio connection
was also located here.
The I/O
connection consisted of two PS/2 ports for the mouse and
keyboard, two USB 2.0 ports and a LAN jack, two serial
and one parallel ports, a game port and three audio
connections. Normally we would expect a lot of the
voltage regulation components to be focused behind the
I/O ports, but
instead they were found between the CPU socket and the
edge of the board. This made for some tricky
maneuvering when trying to latch down the retention
chip on the Athlons HSF. As fans get quite
large, this could cause quite a problem for some
users. As it was, we very carefully pushed down
on the clip with a small screwdriver, praying that we
didn't slip and break off one of the capacitors.
Unlike most
other boards we have seen, there were 4 DIMM slots,
although only 6 banks can be used depending on the
type of RAM being used. Lastly we found the floppy
controller placed by itself in the last corner by the
DIMM slots with all three of the ATX connections.
The 20-pin connector and 12V ATX connection was placed
in the corner, which is a great spot as the power
cables don't need to be snaked around a CPU's heatsink,
and are right about where the end of the power supply
unit would be. Finally three 3-pin fan
headers were spaced out across the board.
Although no active
cooling was found in the North bridge, a gleaming
finned heat sink was placed on it.
THE BUNDLE:
The bundle
contents were somewhat sparse, containing only the motherboard, an audio connection
bracket with a jack for center or bass channel output, one
ATA 80-pin cable, one floppy cable, a bracket with 2 external USB
2.0 ports, a short, red
serial ATA cable, and the manual and driver CD. On the CD
was another copy of the manual in PDF format, and a RAID manual
also in PDF. The VIA 4-in1 driver, AC97 audio,
USB 2.0 and
RAID drivers were all found on the CD, but not much
else. The manual
goes over the basis for new step by step users, but
also alerts experienced users to jump straight into
the jumper settings. All in all, not much to
write home about, but enough to get you up and
running.
THE BIOS, OVERCLOCKING, AND DDR400:
The BIOS came
from AWARD, and had the usual main choices. In the
Advanced BIOS, the boot order could be selected,
offering up to 10 choices. Advanced chipset features
gave us options to modify the DRAM and AGP settings.
The DRAM
clock/Drive Control area showed us the current FSB for
the CPU as well as the current DRAM frequency. This
could be changed in the next setting for DRAM clock.
Choices we found here were 100/133/166/200 or by SPD.
DRAM timing options were manual, auto by SPD, turbo or
ultra. Actually, we were amused how some
manufacturers choose their settings. Some have fast, some
turbo, and now Ultra? The rest of the settings allowed
us to change the latencies, pre-charge timings and command
rate.
The AGP and P2P
Bridge controls gave us option on changing the AGP aperture size and AGP
Mode, and modifications for the driving control and
enabling or disabling
Fast Writes. Wait states can be added to the PCI bus
in the CPU and PCI bus control if needed.
In the Integrated
Peripherals section, we could enable or disable any on
board components. The options here are many
considering the board comes with the on-board audio, HighPoint RAID for both IDE and serial drives, LAN, and
individual serial ATA
connections as well as the standard ports and USB.
The last part
of the BIOS was the most important for you overclockers. When possible, the CPU Ratio can be
selected, anywhere from 5.5x to 14x. As we were using a
locked processor, we left this at default. The CPU
clock was not immediately recognized, and needed to be
added manually. The accepted values were between 100
and 200MHZ with a FSB dividers of auto, /4, and
/5, to keep
the other components in line.
Each voltage
can be modified, with more choices than we were
accustomed to seeing. The CPU Vcore allowed for
1V steps from 1.1V all the
way up to 2.4V, which we were not about to try. 1.85V
is just about the lengths we were willing to go. DDR
voltages were in .5V steps, from 2.5v (default) up to
2.85V. The AGP voltage could be raised from 1.5V
to 1.8V in 1V steps and finally a separate Chipset
voltage in default (2.5) to 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8V.
Raising the RAM to 200MHz
was a nightmare, for the most part. We
immediately had problems rebooting the system, and
lowered the DRAM timings and latencies to achieve
stability. Even then we ran into
problems, when running benchmarks or even loading in
Windows. Sometimes programs would just quit
without warning or give us error messages that seemed
common to overclocking a system. We even ran
into a few "blue screens of death" referring to a file
'FASTFAT.SYS' when running PCMark and Content Creation
Winstone. We spoke with Shuttle who claimed that
these would be fixed with the upcoming KT400A chipset.
Setting the RAM back to 166MHz and overclocking was
easier, but we couldn't get higher than 141MHz without
crashing the system.
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