VIA KT333 Motherboard Roundup - June 2002

Shuttle AK35GT2/R

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Shuttle had one of the most popular KT266A motherboards on the market with the AK31 Revision 3.1; their KT333 based follow up to the board is the AK35GT2/R. The AK35GT2/R is very reminiscent of the KT266A offering that it replaces with its six PCI slots and four DIMM slots. The board ran through all of our tests just fine with all four banks populated with DDR333 SDRAM.

Shuttle has also gone to a fanless cooling design on the North Bridge; you'll only find a small orange heatsink on the KT333 North Bridge. CPU core temperatures are only measured via an external thermistor and not the Athlon XP's thermal diode.

There's no USB 2.0 controller on the AK35GT2/R and you'll only find two on-board ports driven by the 8233A's integrated USB 1.1 controller. Ethernet is also absent from the board but you will find CMedia's 8238 6-channel audio controller.

The /R suffix in the product name indicates RAID support which is provided by the HighPoint HPT372 IDE RAID controller.

The only issues we had with the board were random lockups when in the Frequency/Voltage BIOS Setup screen, most likely due to the constantly updating voltage readouts on that page. Of course with this board you get 1MHz FSB increments and control over all relevant voltages from within the BIOS. Other than the aforementioned issue in the BIOS, we ran into no stability issues during the testing of the AK35GT2/R.