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It seems like it was just
yesterday when I was running a state of the art 486
processor at 33MHz. and a whopping 16MB of RAM. A hot
new game called Doom had everyone talking and I had just
installed a brand new 2X CD-ROM drive in my rig. Since
then (thankfully), the industry has seen a steady influx of
new technologies, as well as improvements upon existing
ones, that have raised the bar of performance to what at the
time seemed improbable. Countless times through the
years we?ve heard statements that a certain product had
reached its limit, and a few months later the limit would be
broken. Take the Intel Pentium III for example: I can
remember when they were able to achieve the speed of 1GHz.
Not long afterward, there was talk that it was unlikely the
1GHz. speed would be broken. Well, here we are talking
about the new ?Tualatin? Pentium III processor running at
1.20 GHz., thanks to the new .13 Micron process. With
the new manufacturing process and lower core voltage
requirements, Intel was able to kick clock speed up by
another 20 percent. Once again, existing technology was
improved even further to enhance an already proven design.
Since its
release at the end of July, the ?Tualatin? has been making
quite a name for itself. After reviewing several
motherboards in the last few months that incorporated
support for Intel?s new PIII, it is clear that the
performance gains of the new design are nothing short of
excellent. With such an impressive showing, it is no
surprise to this reviewer that motherboard manufacturers
would be quick to add a Tualatin-ready motherboard to their
product line. Today we?ll be taking a look at yet another
of these motherboards, the AE25R from Shuttle. To
start, let us take a look at what the AE25R brings to the
table.
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Specifications of the
Shuttle AE25R Motherboard |
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The Run-down... |
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The AE25R offers a nice mix of
features that should allow it to be quite a capable
motherboard. Let's take a little closer look
at the physical design of the AE25R and highlight some of
its finer points.
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Quality & Setup of the Shuttle AE25R
Motherboard |
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Very Nice... |
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The layout of the AE25R is
fairly neat with plenty of room to spare. This is
in-part because of the added length of the board to
accommodate the additional R.A.I.D. components. With
this additional room, it would've been nice to see the power
connector located on the edge of the board. Its
current placement allows the wires of the power supply to
lie in the path of the CPU fan's airflow.
The board comes with 3 fan headers to supply the CPU fan and
two additional chassis fans. The AE25R also has
headers for additional USB support, but unfortunately
Shuttle does not supply the necessary hardware to take
advantage of this added feature.
The AE25R incorporates an
on-board Promise
FastTrak100 R.A.I.D. controller with Lite Bios v1.31.
Lite basically means that you can set up the type of array
you would like with minimal options or tweaks. We hope
that there will be future BIOS updates available that would
allow the more experienced user the ability to change
important settings based on their configuration. In
the case of the AE25R, everything is automatic, which is a
breeze for the novice user.
More
Quality, Setup and the BIOS...
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