AMDPower.com

BIOS

The BIOS that Shuttle shipped with the board was version AK31S9E8. I have not seen this on their website but it does identify the Athlon XP correctly as you can see in the screenshot. As far as tweaking options go in the BIOS, there were quite a few including some advanced PCI and AGP settings as well as your usual manual memory timings. I left most of these to the defaults for testing. The BIOS includes full multiplier support, FSB from 100-166MHz in 1MHz increments, along with VCore and DDR voltage. The voltage settings allow for adjusting up to .275V over the default value so higher voltages are possible than most boards. Here is a weird thing about the 166MHz FSB setting. I set it to 166MHz and the system booted and displayed 1743MHz. I started to get really excited then Windows started to boot. It made it all the way to the desktop and was completely stable. This seemed way to good to be true so I checked WCPUID and it told me the hard truth that I was only running at 100MHz FSB. I don't know if it is a screw up in the BIOS or if there is built in protection for adjusting the frequency too high. I don't think it is the latter because I tried 160MHz FSB and the system wouldn't post. Very strange...

Test Setup

I wanted to test the system against the old KT266 so I used an MSI K7T PRO to bench it against. I tried to keep the BIOS setting as equal as possible and ran each test three times taking the average as the final result. Here is the rest of the setup.

Test System
CPU	AthlonXP 1600+
Harddrive	30GB Quantum Fireball ATA 100
Video Card	GeForce DDR
NIC	Netgear FA310TX
RAM	256MB Crucial PC2100 @ CAS2
OS	Win98 SE

Benchmarks

We don't see much of an improvement here as we shouldn't. The optimizations made to the KT266A were in the way it handled memory.

This is were we expect to see the big difference. A full 30% faster than the KT266 based board isn't bad at all.

NEXT PAGE -- MORE BENCHMARKS