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| Installation
and Setup |
| Ummm...ATX
= Easy |
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The board ships
with all the usual amenities. There is a useful
manual that covers all the board's features, all
necessary floppy and hard drive cables (including
an 80-Pin cable needed for UDMA / 66 operation)
and a CD containing the VIA 4-in-1 driver set. The
drivers on the CD were a little outdated
though. Should you purchase this board, your
first priority is heading to VIA's
driver download page and downloading the
newest release.
Installation of
this board is a complete breeze. Once you've
mounted the board in your case using the proper
stand-offs, set the multiplier for your processor,
plug in all your components and you're ready to
fly. Every other setting is available to you
via the system BIOS, which is good for both the
novice and the power user. Award's newer 6.00G
BIOS is used on the AV14. This newer
revision of the very popular Award BIOS has a ton
of tweaking options, we're sure to see it on many
more future products.
Physical inspection
of the board shows that Shuttle take's pride in
their products. All connectors and traces
are clean and solid but the AV14's layout could
have been thought out a little better. One
thing we did like was the placements of a couple
of the fan headers.
The
fan headers all the way out to the edges makes for
a nice clean case if you bundle the wires
nicely. We sure wish they would have thought
about that when it came to the ATX and floppy
connectors though.
I'm
pulling the cables straight out for the sake of
getting a good pic but this placement is very
poor. In most instances, the AV14 is going
to be mounted in a tower type case, which means
the power supply and floppy cables are going to be
draped directly over the processor. (You can see a
piece of the Socket 370 at the upper right.)
The potential for having the floppy and ATX cables
obstructing airflow over your processor's heatsink
is very real. If you have this board or any
other with a similar layout, take special care to
route your cables neatly and bundle them tightly.
Our
last concern is with the placement of large
capacitors fairly close to the Socket 370
connector.
Notice
the lower-left hand corner where the heatsink just
barely clears the capacitor. With a slightly
lager heatsink, we may not have been able to get
it mounted properly. On the flip side,
having these "larger" capacitors
filtering the power to the CPU results in greater
stability. We are happy to report that
throughout testing we did not experience a single
crash. Those seeking excellent stability
will not be disappointed in the AV14.
Now we
know what the Shuttle AV14 is made of and what it
looks like but I'm sure you're all wondering,
"How does it perform"? It actually
performs quite well....
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