|
Even
though our AV30 was an engineering sample and it's
BIOS was still technically in the "BETA"
stage, it was still chock full of features and had
many tweaking options...
FORGIVE THE BLURRINESS...I
STILL HAVEN'T INVESTED IN A TRIPOD! :)
In the
past, Shuttle generally hasn't had the most
tweakable boards, and although they were capable
of overclocking it always seemed to be an
afterthought...not so with the AV30. We
especially like the ability to simply type in the
desired FSB.
 |
| Overclocking
With The Shuttle AV30 |
| Gettin'
There! |
|
As we
mentioned earlier, overclocking never seemed to be
one of Shuttle's strong points. The AV30 is
an exception though. You can adjust core
voltage and FSBs in 1MHz increments from within
the BIOS. We did have some success but were
slightly disappointed. We used a 933MHz
Pentium III that had successfully run at 1036MHz
on other boards without any voltage tweaks.
With the AV30, the maximum speed we were able to
achieve was 1001Mhz. This isn't a huge
difference, but nonetheless it was lower than
expected. Keep in mind that both the RAM and
motherboard were engineering samples. We'd
expect that shipping, retail products with a more
mature BIOS will
probably perform better.
The H.H. Test Rig was
configured as follows....
 |
| Test
System |
| The
baseline for performance |
|
Shuttle AV30
Motherboard (VIA Apollo Pro 266) with a Pentium
III Processor @ 933MHz.
128MB of
Crucial PC1600 DDR RAM,
IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics
Card
Sound Blaster Live
X-Gamer
Adaptec
AHA-2940 SCSI Controller
Plextor
UltraPLEX 40Max
Windows
Millennum
Direct X 8.0 and
nVidia reference drivers V.6.50
VIA
Chipset drivers (v4.28)
 |
| Head-to-Head
/ Performance Progression |
| The
Shuttle AV30 versus the Asus P4T |
|
We ran
a Quake 3 timedemo at low resolution to see what
kind of performance we could expect from the AV30
/ DDR RAM combo. Normally Quake 3 is used to
test video performance but at low resolutions with
a powerful video card your framerate is limited by
your CPU.
For
the sake of comparison, we pitted the AV30 against
the fastest Q3 rig available, a 1.5GHz P4 mounted
in an Asus P4T...not exactly a fair fight, but who
cares? :)
QUAKE
3
Not
too shabby considering the 500MHz speed
difference! I think the numbers Davo's P4
rig put up are a little low though...
Winstones,
Sandra and The Rating |
