Shuttle AN51R (Athlon 64) nForce3 250 Mainboard

RAID accessibility is accessed via the appropriate field as shown below.

  

Next we find the PC Health screen.  This provides information only.  I was surprised to not find an adjustable CPU warning and shutdown trip temperature field that has become common on many other boards.

Wrapping things up is the Ratio/Voltage fields.  Voltage adjustments are open for tinkering within your CPU, DDR, AGP and Chipset.  Again, see the screens below for the available options.  My only concern was with the DDR voltage.  I would have preferred to see .05MHz increments here over the 2.7-2.8-2.9 options.

     

  

Performance

Testing was completed by making five runs of each benchmark in our suite.  The highest and lowest score for each bench were thrown out and the remaining three averaged which is the score you will see forthcoming.  Our benchmark suite included: SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro, Business Winstone 2004, Content Creation 2004, Code Creatures, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry.  All synthetic and gaming benchmarks were patched with the most recent updates available at the time of this writing.  In our Code Creatures, UT2004 and Fry Cry tests we utilized a relatively new program, Bench Em All.  This a straightforward and effective benchmarking program that I expect to be using more of in the future.  FSAA and AF will be off unless otherwise noted.

For our comparison board today we decided to go with the direct competition to the nForce3-250 chipset, the VIA K8T800 chipset.  Our test board will be the AOpen AK86-L.

Test Bed

• AMD Athlon64 3000+

• Albatron GeForce FX5950 Ultra VGA

• (2) 256 mb DIMM of Corsair XMS3500 DDR

• Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD/CD-RW combo drive

• Windows XP Pro
   

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Board Layout
Pg 3 - Layout and BIOS
Pg 4 - BIOS and Testing
Pg 5 - Business Productivity Benchmarks
Pg 6 - Gaming Benchmarks
Pg 7 - Overclocking and Conclusion