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Shuttle AN51R (Athlon 64) nForce3 250 Mainboard The Board The Shuttle AN51R board is a full size blue PCB board measuring 305mm by 244mm. Organized around the standard five PCI slots and one AGP slot, the AN51R immediately shows itself to be well laid out. This begins with the scattered placement of three 3-pin power connectors. These are circled in yellow on the pic below to the right. The first is just above the socket for a CPU cooler with another placed at the bottom on the right edge of the board. What I liked was how Shuttle tucked a third plug between the AGP and first PCI slot. This is fantastic placement for anyone using an aftermarket VGA cooler. Anything to eliminate wire is tops in my book.
Capacitor placement is smartly done with the bulk along the left edge of the socket. Placement does not appear to present any difficulties for aftermarket coolers. As always, you can expect that sooner or later a fat sink will come along that will change this. You will also notice on the first pic below the ATX12v connector.
One thing that has always graced Shuttle boards of late is the grouped layout of connectors. Just behind the three DIMM slots lay your primary and secondary IDE connectors, FDD connector and ATX12v power connector. Having all your lines and cables in one spot makes wire management easy and the installed board look that much cleaner when in operation.
Moving down to the lower right of the board with find the panel connectors, USB plugs for USB ports 4-8 and first two of the four SATA plugs. The panel connectors are color coded and labeled to keep you from fishing out a manual every time you are working and need to reconnect. Notice also the two small buttons to the right here. These are onboard power and reset buttons. With the AN51R installed in a case these are of little use but lots of times I'll test boards outside of a case or run a rack type set up with everything laid out or piled up making it a necessity to have some way to power up a board. This is a fantastic plus if you need it, if you don't I personally wouldn't sweat the 2 or 3 cents this adds to the end price of the board.
NVidia combines everything into a single chip solution for their nForce chipsets unlike others breaking things up into a Northbridge and a Southbridge. The heatsink mounted on top of the nForce3-250 chipset is a rather small passive solution. It seemed to get the job done but was frequently warmer than I would have liked. The other thing odd here was that underneath the cooler was a thin piece of thermal adhesive instead of grease. No big deal but an interesting aside.
Pg 1 - Introduction
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