Although VIA recently released KT333, its disappointing performance made users still consider KT266A. The difference between the two chipsets is very low; the performance improvement is mainly a matter of implementation. I do not hide you that we have a prerelease KT333 motherboard in the lab which performs worse than many KT266A boards. So that a good KT266A is still a top performer, despite the latest market move to the immature 333MHz DDR. Shuttle are known to offer good motherboards at affordable prices and in the last year they came up with several interesting products. It has been about a year since my last Shuttle motherboard review and I have to tell you that I was quite curious to see how they succeeded to improve their products. I tested AK35GTR, a motherboard based on KT266A which seemed to offer a valuable choice for the overclocking market.

First look

The board is shipped in a regular motherboard box together with a CD, two IDE cables, one floppy cable, one manual, one RAID manual and one bracket containing a sound output plug. The manual is medium to good; there are several areas which are not covered, but you can find inside all information you need. I was quite satisfied to see that Shuttle included a RAID manual inside the package, but obviously the Shuttle guys forgot to add a floppy disk with RAID drivers. This disk is useful only when you install the operating system for the first time, in most other situations you will never need it.
The board has six PCI slots, one AGP, no CNR and four DIMM slots. The four DIMM slots raise the memory amount which can be installed to 4Gb. We will discuss about these issues in the next sections. The first thing which can be noticed in the board's design is that you will not be able to install a very large cooler. The socket is close to the KT266A chip and wide coolers like several Taisol models can not be used. This can be considered a motherboard design lack, but fortunately there are a lot of efficient coolers which fit the board's socket layout. There are four fan headers onboard, but one is used by the chip fan and one is inaccessible because it's placed in a very strange position between the AGP and the first PCI slot. The AGP slot comes with the old AGP retention mechanism. The ATX connector is not placed very well, the CPU socket airflow is obstructed by the power cables.
The IDE connectors are not placed in the best position possible, but the board can be used successfully in lower sized tower ATX cases. AK35GTR uses HPT372 to achieve its RAID functions so that the board supports UDMA133, like most of the new boards out there. There are two USB headers onboard, although no USB bracket is supplied.
You can find the popular CMI8738 sound controller onboard, one of the kings of the integrated sound market. AK35GTR is the first motherboard I have ever seen which has an external connector for the additional Center and BASS channels. Unfortunately the CDROM audio connectors are located near the lower board's edge and in a large case problems may occur due to insufficient cables' length. You can enable digital audio extraction or you can use non standard cables.

Shuttle AK35GTR product picture

Onboard there are only two jumpers, one to write protect the BIOS against accidental damage and one for CMOS clear. The KT266A is cooled by a small heatsink and an impressive "Spacewalker" logo fan.