Shuttle AK37GTR
ATX 2.03 Power for a lot of memory
(Review by MS, October 25, 2002)
Test Configuration
We tested the AK37GTR in a number of different configurations for the simple reasons that AMD is currently offering different lines of processor that may or may not be 100 % compatible even with the latest generation of KT400-based mainboard. The original configuration used a 266 MHz FSB Athlon XP 2400 and with this processor, the AK37GTR was one rock solid board. Just to give an example of what we threw at this board, we had it running for one week in 3DMark2001SE demo loop with 3 full GigaBytes of unbuffered PC2100 DDR running at 166/333 MHz without crashing. This is outstanding, as a matter of fact, we have yet to see any other board that is capable of driving 3 GB of unbuffered system memory, even in PC2100 mode. It is pretty clear that a large portion of this stability can be attributed to the auxiliary power going into the board.
When we switched over to the XP2800+, literally hell broke lose, regardless of the settings, the board was crashing left and right and developed a tendency to corrupt every HDD we threw into the system. It is still not clear what happened, in the end it appeared as if the South Bridge gave up and most of the stability problems were actually coincidence of switching processor and material fatigue since moving back to the XP2400 did not resolve the problems after they had started. Alternatively, we have to consider that the original board was a preproduction sample, we have to further consider the appearance of faulty capacitors in the market and a number of other factors that are too many to elucidate in detail here. A replacement board behaved much more civilized, however, there are still problems in certain applications like Content Creation Winstone2002 and, most importantly, 3DMark2001SE which would not run with the 333 MHz FSB XP 2800+. On the other hand, the AK37GTR is faster than comparable boards in whichever benchmarks we were able to run, leading us to believe that the 333 MHz issues are mostly caused by too aggressive BIOS tuning. Anyway, let's move on to the overall test configurations.
Test Configuration
Hardware
Shuttle AK37GTR
AMD XP2400+, XP2800+
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC3200 DDR (2:2:2 1T CMD Rate 6T tRAS @ 166 MHz clock rate)
3 x 1 GB Mushkin unbuffered PC2100 DDR
Seagate Barracuda SATA V 30GB (preproduction prototype) (8 MB onboard cache)
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Test Configuration