Tuesday, May 01, 2001

Introduction

This time, it's Shuttle's turn to present us with a VIA KT133A board - the latest of a small flood of such devices to arrive in our lab recently. As a result, this Socket A board is being positioned as a competitor to many of the boards we've reviewed of late. In the past, Shuttle has always provided us with products that have been well designed to compete in the mid-range market - thus suiting themselves well to the vast majority of users, who often appreciate their consistency in terms of quality and functionality.

Configuration

The Shuttle AK11 is the only KT133A board we've seen that doesn't require jumpers to be set to access the full range of available FSB frequencies; at least that seems to be the case when JP7 is set for 100MHz.

Other than that, a set of jumpers labeled JP15 is available to set the processor's clock multiplier to a value ranging from 5X to 12.5X. Note that this capability is not reproduced in the BIOS.

Unfortunately, no BIOS options are provided for adjusting the CPU's Vio voltage.

To adjust the FSB from within the BIOS, user's will need to dive into the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu.

From this same menu, it's also possible to change the processor's Vcore voltage, as indicated by the table above.

Within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu, it's possible to change various memory settings, including the memory latency settings, and to set the memory bus to operate at either 100MHz or 133MHz. A number of other functions are also provided.

Next: Technical details.