Monday, December 10, 2001

Introduction

The Shuttle AK31 Revision 3.1 is an updated rendition of the venerable AK31 motherboard that implements the VIA KT266A chipset. Asides from that particular detail, however, very little distinguishes the new board from its predecessors. Thanks to its use of the KT266A, though, the AK31 Rev: 3.1 may be able to boast increased performance when paired with Athlon XP CPUs - a claim often associated with the new chipset. Of course, it also doesn't hurt that the AK31 Rev: 3.1 is also gifted with a number of interesting characteristics, not the least of which is its support for Overclocking.

So, without further ado, let's take a closer look at Shuttle's newest offspring.

Configuration

The Shuttle AK31 Rev: 3.1 sports a purely Jumperless design. It possesses only two on-board jumpers of any note - JP2 and JP5 - which are used to reset, and write-protect the BIOS respectively.

In short, all important configuration matters are handled from within the BIOS.

Adjustments of the CPU, for instance, can be performed from within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu.

Once there, users are presented with a number of options, including the ability to set the FSB frequency to between 100Mhz and 166Mhz in steps of 1Mhz.

The clock multiplier setting can also be set to between 5X and 13X.

The Vcore voltage is also adjustable, but, unfortunately, the same can't be said of the Vio voltage setting.

One interesting feature that did make it onto the board is the ability to set the memory voltage to either 2.55v, 2.60v or 2.70v.

Finally, as you might expect, a number of memory timing options are also configurable from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu, including the ability to set the memory frequency to 100MHz, 133MHz, or SPD (Serial Presence Detect).

Next: Technical details.