Overclocking

Bumping things up on the Shuttle AN51R we found a ceiling of 222MHz.  This is right in line with the other Athlon 64 mainboards we have tested here, making me consider that we are actually tapping out our processor rather than the board.

Conclusion

Shuttle's AN51R is a well rounded and feature rich board for the socket 754 crowd.  It has all the expected features and them some; onboard RAID capable of RAID 0, 1 and 0+1, eight USB 2.0 ports, six channel sound with SPDIF jack, Gigabit and Firewire.  The CMOS clear button on the rear I/O panel was a pleasant find as were the on/off and reset buttons beside the panel connectors.  Its layout was exceptional.  Connector and cable plugs are grouped so as to avoid unnecessary clutter.  This is especially demonstrated by the 3-pin Molex connector fan header placements.  Our test board ran neck and neck in performance compared to the K8T800 board we used in our comparison giving us very good performance.

The only two drawbacks be found was the chipset heatsink.  Something a little bigger if they want to remain keeping a passive solution would be in order.  Our other qualm was the absence of an overtemp warning and shutdown feature from within the BIOS.  Both of these can easily be overlooked given the AN51R's solid and stable operation.  If you are shopping around for a socket 754 board, the Shuttle AN51R is not one to be overlooked and merits our full recommendation.

Pros

• Very good performance

• Outstanding layout

• fan header next to AGP slot

• CMOS clear button on rear I/O panel

• Internal on/off and reset button next to panel connectors

• Six channel sound compete with SPDIF jack

• Gigabit

• RAID

• Inexpensively priced

Cons

• Chipset cooler needs to be larger

• No temp warning/shutdown from within the BIOS

BACK                    HOME

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