Shuttle AS45GTR SiS648 Mainboard Review (11)
Overclocker 15 July 2002

Conclusion

The Shuttle AS45GTR SiS648 is definitely a solid product. To date, it is the first SiS648 board that provides almost all the necessary components needed for the best performance. It has S-ATA, USB2.0, IEEE1394, 8x AGP, 6 ch Audio, ATA-133 RAID (HPT372), AGP Pro Slot. Although during our tests, we find that CC Winstone 2002 and Business Winstone 2001 results are average, the other results esp in the 3D Opengl and Direct3D performs exceptionally well. It is an improvement over the SiS 645DX and definitely much better in memory performance. The new Southbridge SiS963 supports the latest technology and provides the best multimedia performance. With all those connectors, it is definitely one of the best features board around.

Overclocking features, there are the Async DDR settings and FSB range from 100 ~ 165Mhz at 1Mhz stepping. Voltage settings are also available for Vcore up to 2.4V (beware it burns your CPU at such high voltage). The only pity is the max limit to 165Mhz. Well, do we really need such a high FSB since there are various CPU:FSB ratios for async DDR266, DDR333 and Unofficial DDR400 support. Well a new BIOS could probably support all the additional features. 

In our tests, everything works well except running at Async DDR400. This is probably due to the BIOS which is tuned too aggressively for performance. This resulted in instability even when I run at CAS 2.5 , 2T, Normal timings. 

Overall, this board is a stable and interesting new board. We look forward to more interesting boards in the near future.

Discuss

Pros 好处:

• 1Mhz stepping up to 165Mhz
• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 , IEEE 1394
• S-ATA, ATA-133 RAID
• Overclocking features - Voltage, FSB
• 8x AGP

Cons 坏处:

• No On board LAN
• No Diagnostic LEDs
• S-ATA -> IDE card not provided

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 5 stars.

Highly Recommended

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