Shuttle AV32 Motherboard Review

Author : Wayne Date : 19th April 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Shuttle Computer group and especially Jeurgen Bloch of their German branch office for their help and courtesy in providing this motherboard for review.

The chipset :

The Apollo Pro 266 brought a number of new and interesting features to the table, and despite its infancy, it has proved to be a stable springboard for newer technologies. Comprising the VT8633 North Bridge Controller and the VT8233 South Bridge Controller, the big selling point for this particular chipset is its support for DDR memory, allowing a theoretical peak bandwidth of 2.1GB of data per second and support for up to 4GB of DDR200 or 266 SDRAM .
VIA were able to achieve this by using a new memory architecture they have called V-Link which essentially connects the north and southbridge directly, freeing up the pci bus for other things.

Other attractive features of this chipset include lowering memory power requirements to a notebook friendly 2.5volts, support for AGPx4, asynchronous 66,100 and 133MHz FSB clock and ATA100 hard drive handling to name but a few.

Scaleability is also a big feature of the Apollo Pro 266, and while memory transfers are currently only 8bit, there should be room in the design of the V-Link architecture for future chipsets to switch to 16bit or more.

The final feather in the Aplollo's crown is native support for six integrated USB ports, a feature which should illiminate the need for USB hubs for the regular user. Of course only two ports are hardwired onto the board, with the others usually being an optional purchase later on.

 

page3 (Board layout and first impressions)>>>

 

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