Wednesday, July 19, 2000

Introduction

The Shuttle AV14 is one of the newest generation of Socket 370, FC-PGA motherboards that is capable of using PPGA style Celerons, FC-PGA Celerons (Celeron II), and FC-PGA Pentium III Coppermine 'Flip-Chips'. The AV14 is based on the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset, and thus supports 4X AGP, ATA66, as well as PC133 memory on an asynchronous memory bus. Let's now take a look at the board, and see what it has to offer.

The Features

The AV14 is expandable via its 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, and AGP port; but no AMR slots though. There are also 3 168-pin DIMM sockets available, which can support upto 768MB of PC100, or PC133 memory. It has to be said that this is the most generous slot configuration that we've seen on a board in quite a while...

Configuration of the AV14 is accomplished both from within the BIOS, and/or by setting a series of jumpers on the board itself: JP9, JP14, and JP16. JP16 is used to determine the clock of the CPU, while JP14 can be set to allow the FSB frequency to be set automatically by the system. JP9 can also be used to set the clock multiplier, but these days most processors simply ignore this setting. To configure the FSB frequency (and thus the processor speed) through the BIOS, its simply a matter of accessing the 'Frequency/Voltage Control' menu. Once there, a range of frequencies from 66MHz, to 133MHz presents itself. Among the frequencies available, are 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz,100Mhz, 103Mhz, 112Mhz, 124Mhz, and 133Mhz. Please note that a setting of 133MHz can only be achieved by setting jumper JP16, or if the system is left to determine the frequency automatically, and a CPU supporting that speed is installed.

Another option that is made available through the 'Chipset Features Setup' BIOS menu, is the ability to set the memory bus frequency to a setting 33MHz higher or lower than that of the FSB (Note that you can only add 33MHz if the front-side bus is itself operating at 100MHz or less).

Finally, within the 'Chipset Features Setup' menu, there lies the option to adjust the Vcore voltage of the processor to a setting of between 1.35V and 1.95V in steps of 0.5V.

Next: Additional features.