Friday, July 06, 2001

Introduction

The Shuttle AK32 breaks with all previous boards launched on the market by this manufacturer. In an attempt to revamp its product-line, Shuttle has taken a number of steps to appeal to Overclockers, and packaged them in a whole new mainboard meant to compete with the best from Asus, Abit, et al. The AK32 is based on the VIA KT266, which allows it to support 133MHz FSB AMD Athlon processors, as well as both SDR-SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM memory. There's a whole lot more waiting under the hood though, so let's say we take a closer look.

Configuration

In the past, we've been used to receiving Shuttle boards that were a little less refined in the Overclocking department. The AK32 came as a bit of a shock. Not only does it sport a feature-rich BIOS, but it stands as one of few boards currently available that doesn't require users to set jumpers in order to configure the CPU - and that includes the FSB frequency.

In other words, the Shuttle AK32 is a truly Jumperless board. Only two jumpers are even included, and they're respectively used to reset the BIOS, and/or write-protect it.

In short, anything alterations that need be, or can be done are carried out from within the BIOS.

Adjustments related to the CPU can be performed from within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu.

Once there, users can set the FSB to a frequency ranging from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1MHz steps.

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

Next on the list, we have the ability to adjust the Vcore voltage. Unfortunately, the Vio voltage cannot be altered.

As one might expect, a wide range of memory timing options can also be tweaked from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu. Among the options presented we can note the ability to set the independent memory bus frequency to 100MHz, 133MHz, or to SPD (Serial Presence Detect), which will set the frequency automatically.

Next: Technical details.