VIA and SiS Battle for Supremacy: 3-way P4 DDR Motherboard Roundup

Shuttle AS45GTR

Shuttle isn’t usually the first motherboard maker to release products based on the latest chipset technology. However, in the case of the Shuttle AS45GTR motherboard, things are quite different.

Shuttle was the very first motherboard manufacturer to market with a SiS 648-based board. But that’s not what makes the AS45GTR impressive, not by any means. The AS45GTR’s features are exceptional among Pentium 4 motherboards.

To start off with, Shuttle integrates IDE RAID in the form of Highpoint’s 372 chip, which supports RAID 0 and 1 arrays. The majority of users should be happy with the onboard RAID options even though it lacks RAID 0+1 support. In addition to RAID, you can connect up to a maximum of four IDE devices (one Master and one Slave per channel).

The AS45GTR also leverages the features native to the SiS 963 South Bridge; that includes USB 2.0, 1394a (FireWire), ATA133, and 6-channel sound. The only feature Shuttle did not utilize that the SiS 693 natively supports is the Ethernet controller. With all these native features, you can connect up to 6 USB2.0 devices and 3 FireWire devices in addition to ATA133 RAID arrays or just regular ATA133 hard drives.

The most unique feature the AS45GTR integrates is a Serial ATA chip, dubbed the Marvel 88i8030. You have the option of connecting as many as two SATA drives to the AS45GTR via two tiny black SATA connectors located on the bottom right corner of the board. One of the many reasons we like the idea of SATA is the fact that SATA cables are extremely small compared to the thick and airflow-constricting IDE cables that we’ve all had to deal with.

Although SATA hard drives will be quite difficult to find in the coming months, it’s certainly not a bad thing to have SATA support onboard. You can expect to see an in depth review of Serial ATA the moment we can get our hands on drives, so don’t worry.

Though the AS45GTR’s features are certainly tempting, we have learned in the past that pricing is an important issue. But if you think that getting the newest chipset on the block in addition to onboard sound, FireWire, USB 2.0, RAID, and SATA would cost more than just a pretty penny, you’re wrong. Shuttle says this baby will debut at a measly $120.

In terms of layout, the Shuttle AS45GTR isn’t anything particularly special. All the IDE and Floppy connectors as well as the 4-pin ATX12V and 20-pin ATX lines are positioned well. The only issue with have with the layout of this board is the location of the DIMM slots, which are placed a little too closely to the AGP slot. In general though, we liked the layout.

Another interesting aspect of the AS45GTR’s layout is the addition of a black passive heatsink over the SiS 693 South Bridge. This isn’t all that necessary, but it’s certainly not a bad thing to add extra cooling to such a vital part of your motherboard, so we can’t complain.

Overclocking & Stressing the AS45GTR

Shuttle had overclockers in mind for the most part when they designed this board; you have the option of raising Vcore to a sizzling 1.85V and DDR voltage as high as 2.75V. There are also four different CPU:Memory ratio options, which includes 4:3, 1:1, 4:5, and 2:3. In addition, you can adjust the FSB in 1MHz increments between 100-165MHz, which isn’t all that stellar (especially if you have a Northwood-B processor), but it’s acceptable for most nonetheless. Unfortunately, we were unable to find an option for locking the AGP and PCI buses at 66MHz and 33MHz. All in all though, the AS45GTR provides offers a decent overclocking feature set.

To stress the AS45GTR we ran Prime95 torture tests for a full 24 hours straight using Samsung DDR333 memory at default (i.e. conservative) timings. The board never failed a single test. We weren’t completely satisfied yet, so we adjusted memory timings to more aggressive levels, like bumping it up to Turbo mode and lowering CAS Latency down to 2 (from CL2.5). Yet again, the Shuttle board successfully completed all Prime95 torture tests and seamlessly ran all other applications we threw at it (including various DX8 games, DivX, etc.).