Shuttle AV40 Pentium 4 P4X266 DDR Motherboard

Shuttle's AV40
VIA P4X266 DDR P4 Motherboard
RAMBUS, watch your back, DDR comes to the P4

By, Dave Altavilla
October 15, 2001

This board from Shuttle incorporates all the refinements that many "jumperless" motherboards bring to market, including CPU setup, DRAM Timings and Voltage settings in the BIOS. 

Installation and Setup - Shuttle's AV40 Crisp and clean

Going far beyond what we have seen from ANY Pentium 4 motherboard to date, the AV40 not only offers voltage settings for the CPU core, it also offers chipset and memory voltage settings.  Although we didn't have a need to crank up the chipset or DDR voltage in our tests, we are sure this will come in handy for some users where they are running the system on the hairy edge of stability. 

Speaking of which, once we had the AV40 configured, the system was extremely stable throughout all of our testing.  Even when we ran things heavily over clocked, we didn't experience a single glitch.  We also  should comment on VIA's chipset platform in general.  Clearly, VIA has developed a base core logic architecture that has matured very well.  Compatibility and support of all the latest peripheral technologies, are a strong suit for VIA.  Years ago, most power users wouldn't even consider chipsets from third party vendors like VIA or SiS etc.  However, non-Intel chipsets these days, are a very attractive option and VIA certainly leads the charge in this area.

HotHardware's Test System The Pentium 4 and DDR, a natural

• Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz. Processor

• Shuttle AV40 Pentium 4 Motherboard - VIA P4X266 Chipset

• Abit TH7II-RAID Pentium 4 Motherboard

• 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM

• 256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM ( provided by Arena Computers! )

• nVidia GeForce3 AGP

• Glacial Tech Igloo 4300 Pentium 4 Cooler

• IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

• Windows 2000 Professional w/ SP2

• Direct X 8.0a and nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 21.81

• Intel chipset drivers version 3.20

New Cooling - Enter Glacial Tech's Igloo 4300:
Pentium 4 CPU cooling is a technology that is improving every day.  In recent P4 motherboard reviews, within our test setup section, we have shown you new Heat Sink and Fan coolers that we used in our tests.  In this test we used a new cooler from Glacial Tech, called the Igloo 4300.

This cooler comes equipped with a 5,000 RPM fan and does a good job of keeping things cool under pressure.  This isn't a heat sink review but we did want to pause here to show you another excellent cooling option available to Pentium 4 users.  We used it in our overclocked setup and this unit had no trouble keeping heat under control.  Also, notice in the picture on the right, we are using a stick of new Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM.  Our good friends at Arena Computers helped us out with these sticks of DDR.  We highly recommend Arena for their great service and solid pricing.  Tell Shawn H.H. sent you!

Overclocking With The Shuttle AV40 Like a rock...

With the AV40 we used an Intel Engineering sample 1.9GHz. CPU.  In most of the benchmarks, we ran it at 1.8GHz. (18 X a stock 100MHz. Quad Pumped FSB).  However, in our overclocking tests, we ran the multiplier at 19X and were easily able to break 2GHz. with this chip.  We didn't stress things too hard at all.  However,  we set our CPU to 110MHz. Quad Pumped for 452MHz. Front Side Bus and 2090MHz. on the CPU.  This is what we produced, once we booted Win2K.

As you can see, the AV40 runs things a little aggressively as far as timing goes.  Although we had the FSB set to 110MHz. SDR here, the PLL is actually running things at 111.24MHz. SDR or 444.96 QDR.  Regardless, the AV40 is a strong overclocking solution, taking this 1.9GHz. chip well over 200MHz. beyond its stock clock speed.  The AV40 and the P4, ran a Quake 3 time demo loop test in our lab for over 2 hours straight.  Things were very stable.

Benchmarks - Sandra, Winstones and 3DBench