Shuttle AV40R Review

Author : Wayne Date : 31st October 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Shuttle and especially Don Joe for their help and courtesy in providing this motherboard for review.

A closer look :

A quick look over the AV40R confirms that it is a well thought out board with some thoughtful touches and excellent component quality. Although it sports 3 DIMMs, memory support is limited to only 1.5GB of PC1600 or PC2100 DDR SDRAM which is probably more than you're ever likely to need but which falls short of the 3GB limit found on Intel's i845. The additional IDE RAID connectors (yellow connectors RAID1 and RAID2) are offset against the PCI slots allowing for use of full length cards but the positions of the standards IDE connectors (blue and white) means there's no hope of slotting full length cards into either the AGP slot or the first two PCI slots. By using only 5 PCI slots, Shuttle have been able to avoid the problem of AGP cards fouling the DIMMS and there is enough clearance to swap and change your memory without having to first remove your graphics card.

The North Bridge is fitted with active cooling which should also help with board stability, particularly when overclocked.

The position of the primary ATX power connector is just about as close to the rear of your PSU as you're likely to get (in a tower configuration that is) to the point that it's almost hard to get at it in some mid ATX tower setups that have strengthening braces fitted below the power supply.

 

The AV40R comes equipped with the future ready socket 478. This socket is smaller than the older 423 pin version and should allow plenty of upgrade options later on. In the middle of the socket is an external thermal diode which offers additional temperature monitoring.

Unlike some board manufacturers, Shuttle opted for the better option of keeping both auxiliary power connectors reasonably close to each other which makes for tidier cable routing.

Though its not an unusual feature any more and isn't mentioned in Shuttle's promo material, the telltale Mofset arrangement indicates the use of a more robust three phase power supply.

Another nice feature is the addition of an AGP retention mechanism, a feature often overlooked by board manufacturers but one which is certainly worth having considering its negligible cost to the manufacturer.

RAID functions :

RAID functions are catered for using the Promise 265R controller which offer two additional ATA-100Bus Master IDE channels and offers both RAID 0 (Striping) which boosts system performance by performing multiple reads and writes to your array concurrently, RAID 1 (Mirroring) which increases data security by writing the same data to multiple drives in the array concurrently.

The chipset :

The reason for all the legal activity between Intel and VIA is VIA's P4X266 , a chipset that Intel maintain VIA have no license to produce, though they claim the license was acquired when they acquired xxxxxx. The South Bridge that we find partnering the P4X266 is VIA's VT8233, an impressive chip in its own right. The VT8233 is home to VIA's much praised V-Link host controller which basically allows for a 266MB/s transfer rate between North and South Bridges. You'll also find three USB root hubs running a potential six USB ports, dual channel ATA-100, PC99-Compatible Mobile Power Management and LPC interface amongst its bevy of features.

By comparison the P4X266 seems a relatively humble beast, but what it does it does well. By pairing the P4 with DDR SDRAM the P4X266 offers a very definite advantage over i845's SDR limitations. Even DDR can't cater to the P4's ravenous desire for bandwidth (3.2GB/s), but it stands to reason that 2.1GB/s (PC2100) will offer less of a bottleneck than the 1.06GB/s offered by conventional PC133 SDRAM. Although the P4X266 also offers support for SDR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to create a board that takes advantage of the fact.

 

Fan headers (or lack thereof) are the only major gripe I have with this board. Only three headers are supplied, one of which is used for the chipset fan and one is used for the CPU fan leaving just one to work with.

Page 3 - Features and BIOS

 

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