Shuttle AK31 v3.1 Motherboard Review - Shuttle AK31 v3.1 Motherboard Review
(Page 3 of 5 )
| Company: Shuttle Inc.
Product: Shuttle AK31 V3.1 KT266A Motherboard
Price: $80 approx
Availability: Now
Written by: Mack (SPeeD)
Reviewed: February, 2001 |
BIOS Features: Ok, we have covered quite a bit of the physical aspects of the board up to this point. Now I say we put her to the test and see what she can handle. There's really nothing worse than starting up your system with a new mobo and getting no boot up at all. Yes, this is what I got. The system powered up fine, all fans running, HD and CD-Rom spinning, but no BOOT. A dead mobo perhaps? Hopefully not. I began some basic troubleshooting steps and eventually was able to boot when I swapped the HD IDE with the one the CD-Roms were previously on. We got BOOT! In the end, it turned out to be a rounded IDE cable that the Shuttle mobo just did not like, so I replaced it with the included ATA/100 cable. Haven't had a problem since.
Lets go into the BIOS Setup screen and checkout a few of the menu screens.
Here we see the front setup screen. Pretty standard fare for Award BIOS'. Still nice that it's very familiar so we won't have to learn many new tricks to tweak out this mobo.
Lets head on into the "Advanced BIOS Features" and see what we can tweak.
Advanced BIOS Features
Virus Warning disabled. Default. CPU L1 and L2 Cache enabled of course to take advantage of your processors onboard memory cache. Definitely enable the "Quick Power On Self Test" option. If not, you'll be greeted with a BIOS memory count each time you boot up. Nobody wants a slow boot. Which brings us to the First, Second and Third Boot Devices. I have mine set to read Hard Drive 0 and nothing else. Why? Well, unless I plan on loading windows from a CD or using a rescue disk, I know I'll only be booting to my main hard drive. This should save us a few valuable milliseconds since the BIOS will only have to look for 1 device while booting. I have also disabled Swap Floppy Drive and Boot Up Floppy Seek to help shorten the bootup process as well. Every little bit helps. Alright, lets checkout PC Health Status.
PC Health Status
This BIOS screen will show you current and CPU temps, as well as fan speeds that have RPM monitoring capability. Both of mine do, unfortunately, I have never been able to get this motherboard to read them. Quite an annoyance if your curious to checkout what RPM your fans are running. 1 of the fans I have hooked up is the Enermax PSU fan which worked fine on the MSI K7T266A Pro2 motherboard.
Frequence/Voltage Control
Ahhh, the Frequency/Voltage Control screen. This will be every overclockers favorite place to hangout in the BIOS. Here you can change and set the CPU Voltage, Multiplier and FSB, as well as Memory Voltage if you plan on some serious overclocking. Everything is laid out in a simple way so you can tweak whatever options you choose quickly and easily.
AGP and P2P Bridge Control
Here you can make sure your set for 4X AGP Mode, set AGP Aperture Size (pretty moot) and also enable AGP Fast Writes which should give you a slight performance boost in certain apps. I've also heard that enabling AGP Master 1 WS Write and Read you will see a small gain. I cannot confirm or deny this, so try it at your own risk.
DRAM Clock/Drive Control
This will be an overclockers 2nd fav place to hang out. Here you can tweak your memory till it hurts. If your memory can hang, you can set CAS ratings, Bank Interleave and other goodies that can get you more performance. On most of these settings, lower is better, except Bank Interleave. You want to run 4 Bank if at all possible. Quite a few memories cannot hang at higher SPeeDs so your mileage may vary. I suggest tweaking 1 or 2 options at a time then find your sweet spot. As always, when you get a BSOD, back off a bit and try it again.
Next: Shuttle AK31 v3.1 Motherboard Review >>
More Motherboards Articles
More By SPeeD
| Recommended by Dev Hardware |
|---|
|
/ 9 
