Shuttle AK35GTR Initial Impressions

[DaGooch]

This board for me has turned out to be the most versatile and fastest board to date for the Socket A platform and I have gone through quite a few of them in the past year.

Shuttle has incorporated voltages above 1.85V all the way up to 2.30V which actually work. This is a bold move by Shuttle to cater to the enthusiast market and which will make the board not be listed on the AMD approved/recommended motherboard list.

Just to let others know of some information that do pick up this board, I have put my Santa Cruz pci card in Slot 3 and my NIC in Slot 5. I also have turned off the onboard C-Media Pro in bios and the midi and joystick ports in bios as well and is working out great! The NIC has it's own IRQ and the Santa Cruz is sharing with the onboard USB where the C-Media Pro would be sharing if not turned off in bios.

Sandra TE memory benchmarks are 810/990 at 133 FSB and the High Point 372 Raid controller with 2 GXP60 hard drives scores 40K~41K whereas a Promise TX2 controller in a pci slot scores 31K~33K with the exact same drives and stripe size of 16K.

The only gripe that I have is the lack of a 12.5 multiplier for 1667Mhz with a FSB of 133. I can easily do 1694 with 2.10V but with a FSB of 141 and the PCI bus at slightly above 35Mhz which is not too far off from the standard 33Mhz, but with a Raid 0 array and possible data corruption and formatting my hard drives is something that I wish not to do on a frequent basis. Also, I have booted to windows at 1733 with a 13X multiplier with 2.20V but the system will get unstable with CPU temperatures approaching 50C. I guess it is time to get a water cooling setup!

[JAWS]

Thank you for every word from your post. I get mine probably tomorrow or the next day. I was going to PM you with a lot of questions, but you seemed to have answered some!

When I get the board setup, if you don't mind, I might have some questions about the raid. (this will be my first raid board)

[JBELL]

Originally posted by JAWS
Thank you for every word from your post. I get mine probably tomorrow or the next day. I was going to PM you with a lot of questions, but you seemed to have answered some!

When I get the board setup, if you don't mind, I might have some questions about the raid. (this will be my first raid board)

looks like I will go shuttle - don't PM the questions - leave them out for us all to read!

[DaGooch]

Just post all questions so that others may also benefit.

[JAWS]

Thanks! Will Do!

[DaGooch]

I found out that a 12.5 and 13.5 multiplier is available in bios when one is using an unlocked Athlon XP processor but not when using an Athlon Thunderbird.

[DaGooch]

Jaws:

Are you going to be using an Athlon XP or Thunderbird for your new AK35GTR? I have an AXIA Y 1200 "C" that i put in just for fun and it did 1600 fine with 2.10V but I tell ya that sucker got real hot real quick to 50C at full load. Had it running UD for over 4 hours and I decided to put back in my AYHJA 1333. I hope your AXIA Y is much cooler running than mine. Straight water cooling or water cooling with phase change (Peltier) or a full blown phase change unit seems like the only viable options now for a lot of us.

[JAWS]

Cool! That's the same chip I have. I'll be running it 2 weeks, and then hopefully I'll be getting an xp. I still haven't decided which one. (leaning toward the 1600+) I run around 50c with the vcore set at 2.11. It's safe to say, I'm very excited about getting this mobo.

[JAWS]

First question? Changing from Abit to Shuttle do I run into problems? I ask because of this:

http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/sho...threadid=63547

[JBELL]

Originally posted by JAWS
First question? Changing from Abit to Shuttle do I run into problems? I ask because of this:

http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/sho...threadid=63547

only possible issues is board specific drivers.... thats easy to handle

[JAWS]

Originally posted by JBell


only possible issues is board specific drivers.... thats easy to handle

cool! I haven't done this in long time!

[DaGooch]

It's a pain but I usually reformat when changing motherboards even say from Ak31V2.0 to ak31v3.1.

[JAWS]

H/W Audio
C-Media 8738
Support 5.1 speakers
C3DX positional audio in 6 CH speaker mode
HRTF-3D positional audio
supporting Direct Sound 3D and A3D interface


Is the on-board sound worth using for the time being? I'm only asking because I'm currently using the S.B. Pro 16.

[DaGooch]

Yes, the onboard sound actually is very good.

[JAWS]

Okay this was a post from oc.com from someone who just got the board:


well heres the report. I am very dissaappointed in the board. I can't het over 143 stable with an temp of 23c. i had to reinstall winxp 14 times just trying to get it to see the raid controler. It never did see it i tried the drivers on the cd and the drivers off the website. I finally got xp installed and i suffer from random reboots with a fsb of 133.....Winxp still doesn't see the raid controlers right.....im gonna call newegg tomarrow and see if i can return it and get another board. what other board can you adjust the vcore with out a mod?


DaGooch, did you have any problems with the raid?

[DaGooch]

No problems whatsoever. Windows 2000 installed perfectly on the Raid 0 array on the first try. He possibly did not build the array correctly in the HighPoint bios and possibly did not press F6 during install for the High Point drivers. If needed I will write a comprehensive raid installation guide for this motherboard in this forum.

[JAWS]

I got the board. Here come the noob questions.

When you say reformat, do you mean wiping everything off the hard drive? Or just reinstall windows.

What do I plug into the raid controllers?

[JBELL]

Originally posted by JAWS
I got the board. Here come the noob questions.

When you say reformat, do you mean wiping everything off the hard drive? Or just reinstall windows.

What do I plug into the raid controllers?

format means you kill everything and start new...

[JAWS]

In the Raid Administrator manual, I see like 5 different array's to choose from. Which one do I choose?

[JBELL]

Originally posted by JAWS
In the Raid Administrator manual, I see like 5 different array's to choose from. Which one do I choose?

Riad0 with 16K cluster

[JAWS]

I never could get the raid to work! very long story, I'll explain tomorrow.

[DaGooch]

[JBELL]

Originally posted by JAWS
I never could get the raid to work! very long story, I'll tomorrow explain .

how do you keep a blonde overclocker in suspense?







...........................I'll tell ya later!

[JAWS]

I'm going to try to keep this short.

When I finished the raid; low in behold, I couldn't install Win 98 on my HD's because they were formatted NTFS. (not FAT32) After about 30 minutes, I decided to use FDISK and began to install 98, which took forever.

After 98 was installed, I began XP. I would get to the area where you press F6 and that’s it.

Press F6/ scan found nothing/ press the s key/ insert disk/

Then windows would tell me they had a default driver I could use, if not use the one on the disk. Okay, pressed enter and got an error. Went back and used window's driver, same error.

After trying this about 100 times, I tried not installing the raid. A blue screen came up every time right after they scan for raid. What I'm thinking is that my piece of öööö little hard drive failed. It was 10g 5400 together with 30g 7200. They did not work together. Believe me I tried everything

DaGooch, which via drivers are you using?

[DaGooch]

Sorry to hear the raid 0 setup did not go well with your hard drives. If you want info on some IBM 20G 7200rpm models that are pulls from server equipment I can send you a link. They are rather quite inexpensive at $52.00 a piece. Concerning the VIA drivers, I am presently using 4.37a and you can download them from http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2
Just found out all the IBM drives were sold. You can keep on checking http://secured.teamexcess.com/servle...list&sql=sql04 for hard drives from server pulls.