VIA KT266A Motherboard Roundup - January 2002

Shuttle AK35GTR

Days before this roundup was published, Shuttle rushed us their latest KT266A solution, the AK35GTR, which will replace the good old AK31 Rev. 3.1 very soon. Since the AK31 Rev. 3.1 was the first KT266A board with 4 DIMM slots implemented, we were eager to see how well the AK35GTR would do against the competition.

By just looking at the board, you will notice that Shuttle continues to stay with their 4 DIMM slots and 6 PCI slots design. It is one of the only three boards in this roundup that offers 6 PCI slots, and it's the only other board besides the ABIT KR7-RAID that contains 4 DIMM slots.

Shuttle has been very confident in their 4 DIMMs design. During our testing we encountered a couple of lockups and they were resolved by lowering the memory settings. While this is not as solid as what we encountered with the ABIT KR7-RAID, the AK35GTR is still considered to be very stable with all DIMMs populated.

In addition to that, Shuttle also decided to put in an integrated RAID controller, something that appears in a lot of the other candidates in this roundup. Shuttle went with the newer Highpoint HPT372 RAID controller, which supports Ultra ATA133 devices as well.

Shuttle also upgraded the on-board audio from the VIA VT1611A on AK31 Rev. 3.1 to the C-Media CMI8738 6 channel audio chip. Moreover Shuttle also includes a little module that allows you to plug in a subwoofer should you have one. This is slightly less than what the Iwill XP333 and the Soyo Dragon Plus! offer, but still it's better than the old AC97 audio. Last of all, the AK35GTR is the only board in this roundup that has two sets of USB headers included, so you can easily hook up the second and third sets of USB ports (for a total of 8 connectors).

On the overclocking side, the AK35GTR allows you to push the CPU core voltage past the 1.850V limit to 2.3V in the BIOS. While this could lead to some extreme overclocking, we strongly recommend some hardcore cooling for the CPU, as such high voltage could seriously shorten the life of the CPU.

Despite of the voltage settings, our biggest complain comes in the lack of the 100/133 memory settings. This means that as you increase the FSB speed, the memory speed will increase accordingly as well, which will become a bottleneck in no time. This is partly the reason why we were not able to push the FSB to as high as what the ABIT KR7-RAID or the Iwill XP333 could reach.

The AK31 Rev. 3.1 was a huge success for Shuttle. Being one of the fastest KT266A board and also equipped with 4 DIMMs the AK31 Rev 3.1 could easily outrun a lot of the competition. This time around they bring the newer and better AK35GTR, which is more or less the AK31 Rev. 3.1 plus the new RAID controller and an upgraded audio, and it again surprises us. We are happy to see how what Shuttle has done with their two KT266A products.