This board
from Shuttle incorporates all the refinements that many "jumperless"
motherboards bring to market, including CPU setup, DRAM
Timings and Voltage settings in the BIOS.
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Installation and Setup - Shuttle's AV40 |
Crisp and clean |
|
CPU
Clock
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CPU
Multipliers
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DRAM
Timings
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CPU
Voltage
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Chipset
Voltage
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DDR
Memory Voltage
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Going far beyond what we have
seen from ANY Pentium 4 motherboard to date, the AV40 not
only offers voltage settings for the CPU core, it also
offers chipset and memory voltage settings. Although
we didn't have a need to crank up the chipset or DDR voltage
in our tests, we are sure this will come in handy for some
users where they are running the system on the hairy edge of
stability.
Speaking of which, once we had
the AV40 configured, the system was extremely stable
throughout all of our testing. Even when we ran things
heavily over clocked, we didn't experience a single glitch.
We also should comment on VIA's chipset platform in
general. Clearly, VIA has developed a base core logic
architecture that has matured very well. Compatibility
and support of all the latest peripheral technologies, are a
strong suit for VIA. Years ago, most power users
wouldn't even consider chipsets from third party vendors
like VIA or SiS etc. However, non-Intel chipsets these
days, are a very attractive option and VIA certainly leads
the charge in this area.
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HotHardware's Test System |
The Pentium 4 and
DDR, a natural |
|
-
Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz.
Processor
-
Shuttle AV40 Pentium 4
Motherboard - VIA P4X266 Chipset
-
Abit TH7II-RAID Pentium 4
Motherboard
-
256MB of Samsung PC800
RAMBUS DRDRAM
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256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR
SDRAM ( provided by
Arena Computers! )
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nVidia GeForce3 AGP
-
Glacial Tech Igloo 4300 Pentium 4 Cooler
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IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100
7200 RPM Hard Drive
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Windows 2000 Professional
w/ SP2
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Direct X 8.0a and nVidia
Detonator 4 reference drivers version 21.81
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Intel chipset drivers
version 3.20
New Cooling - Enter Glacial
Tech's Igloo 4300:
Pentium 4 CPU cooling is a technology
that is improving every day. In recent P4 motherboard
reviews, within our test setup section, we have shown you
new Heat Sink and Fan coolers that we used in our tests.
In this test we used a new cooler from
Glacial
Tech, called the Igloo 4300.
This cooler
comes equipped with a 5,000 RPM fan and does a good job of
keeping things cool under pressure. This isn't a heat
sink review but we did want to pause here to show you
another excellent cooling option available to Pentium 4
users. We used it in our overclocked setup and this
unit had no trouble keeping heat under control. Also,
notice in the picture on the right, we are using a stick of
new
Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM. Our good friends at
Arena Computers helped us out with these sticks of DDR.
We
highly recommend Arena for their great service and solid
pricing. Tell Shawn H.H. sent you!
|
Overclocking
With
The Shuttle AV40 |
Like a rock... |
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With the AV40 we used an Intel
Engineering sample 1.9GHz. CPU. In most of the
benchmarks, we ran it at 1.8GHz. (18 X a stock 100MHz. Quad
Pumped FSB). However, in our overclocking tests, we
ran the multiplier at 19X and were easily able to break
2GHz. with this chip. We didn't stress things too hard
at all. However, we set our CPU to 110MHz. Quad
Pumped for 452MHz. Front Side Bus and 2090MHz. on the CPU.
This is what we produced, once we booted Win2K.
As you can see, the AV40 runs
things a little aggressively as far as timing goes.
Although we had the FSB set to 110MHz. SDR here, the PLL is
actually running things at 111.24MHz. SDR or 444.96 QDR.
Regardless, the AV40 is a strong overclocking solution,
taking this 1.9GHz. chip well over 200MHz. beyond its stock
clock speed. The AV40 and the P4, ran a Quake 3 time
demo loop test in our lab for over 2 hours straight.
Things were very stable.
Benchmarks - Sandra, Winstones and 3DBench
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