The Motherboards
The motherboards and their features
We’re taking a close look at Shuttle’s AV40-R and Tyan’s Trinity 510 boards. ECS had sent us a board to test as well, but it turned out to be an i845, and couldn’t resubmit a P4X266 based board in time for the roundup.
The Shuttle AV40-R is definitely the more featured-filled motherboard in this comparison, although Tyan does offer a different skew of the Trinity 510 with onboard audio (by chipset codec) and LAN using an Intel 100 controller. The AV40-R’s onboard audio is also using the chipset codec instead of utilizing one of the few available hardware options like the C-Media controllers commonly found on boards from Asus and Iwill. Although not an Audigy killer by any means, the C-Media 6-channel solutions are actually very good if you play lots of games but don’t listen to much music, or you listen to music but don’t like paying through your nose for high-end PC speakers. Often times, you’ll actually get better audio by going with better speakers than by going with a better sound card.
We generally don’t like anything onboard and most definitely if it’s onboard audio. This is because most solutions are just hard coded codecs that are processed by the host CPU and take up precious CPU cycles. There will always be those who won’t mind either way, simply because today’s processors are fast enough that most onboard codecs don’t show noticeable performance hits.
Been Speeding?
Both boards come equipped with overclocking options but the Tyan Trinity 510 is very limited in options compared to the Shuttle. Both boards come with FSB and clock multiplier settings but the Shuttle AV40-R comes with all that and options for tweaking voltage for practically all facets of the motherboard. Interesting to note is that the Award BIOS for P4X266 boards only allow you to adjust clock multiplier 3 bins above the actual setting. For example, both the AV40-R and the Trinity 510 only allowed us to set a maximum of 23X for our 2GHz P4 CPU. If you’re using a 1.5GHz CPU, you’ll be locked at 18X max. While this may first seem a little disappointing to some, it’s worth noting that 3 full bin jumps is quite large for the P4 and you’ll almost always be more successful tinkering with FSB settings.
Not leaving anything to spare, Shuttle also includes a Promise UltraATA/100 RAID controller with the AV40-R. For those who don’t yet know, the Promise RAID controllers are also capable of acting as standard IDE controllers. We’ve seen a few sites document that the onboard Promise RAID solution – and other Promise RAID controllers for that matter – is capable only of RAID-enabled operation. This is not true, as there’s a specific way of setting up your drives to have the RAID controller “act” as all purpose IDE controller. If you have more than one hard drive attached to the RAID controller, simply set each drive to a different RAID mode. For example, set HD1 to mirroring mode and HD2 to striping mode. Since the two modes are incompatible with each other, they will simply function in standard UltraATA mode. The same trick goes for DVD, CD-ROM and other drives.
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