VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

Shuttle AV40/R

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Shuttle was another early adopter of the P4X266 chipset with their AV40/R. Just like most of the other motherboards in this roundup, the AV40/R was not stable with all memory banks populated making 2 DIMMs the realistic maximum for the board.

An interesting shortcoming of the motherboard is the use of an external thermistor to measure the CPU temperature rather than using the Pentium 4's on-die thermal diode to perform a much more accurate version of the same task.

The AV40/R offers many more voltage tweaking options than any of the other motherboards in this roundup which is what we've come to expect from most manufacturers, but we've been left disappointed with most of the competing solutions in this roundup; it's good to see that Shuttle put more effort into the production of the AV40/R than most.

Onboard audio is provided by VIA's own AC'97 codec and the only other feature is the Promise IDE RAID controller. Just as we noticed in our 845 DDR roundup, the Promise IDE RAID controller defaults all RAID 0 configurations to a 64KB stripe size with no hope for changing that option.