The Shuttle AK35GTR is based on VIA's much loved KT266A chipset, so we already have a pretty good idea of how fast this board is going to be. Knowing this, what does Shuttle have to offer with the AK35GTR that the competition can't? In one word, price. The AK35GTR is packed full of features and rivals Abit's KR7A-RAID as one of the most feature rich KT266A-based boards we've reviewed. With one 4xAGP slot, six PCI slots, on board hardware based 5.1 audio using the CMedia 8738 chipset and most notably on board Ultra/133 IDE RAID (using Highpoint's HPT372 controller) there is a lot of stuff on this PCB. The only thing I wonder about is why Shuttle hasn't adopted a prettier PCB colour, but that's really trivial.

Shuttle AK35GTR Motherboard
	Ships with the following: 2x IDE ATA66/100 Cable FDD Cable 2x USB bracket Driver CD-ROM Subwoofer bracket User Manual

As we can see, the AK35GTR has a clean layout, and while I do have my usual complaints about the position of the IDE/Floppy drive connectors, I think I'll give up it even mentioning it anymore because motherboard manufacturers don't seem to be listening. It's a war I just can't win!

The ATX power connector is located near the top of the board right behind the PS/2 and USB ports. If you are careful about where the ATX power cable sits during installation you can avoid most problems of restricted airflow to the processor easily enough. If the ATX power tap were lower down on the PCB, by the AGP slot for instance, the issue would be significantly more cumbersome.

The area close to the CPU socket has been cleared of capacitors which is extremely nice if you need to install a large heatsink, like the Alpha PAL8035 or just about any Swiftech. The AK35GTR supports a total of three fan headers, which these days is pretty common. Two of them would be difficult to reach if the video card was plugged into the AGP slot since they're just about under it.

You will also have to remove the videocard to install, remove memory as the two sockets are packed in very tightly beside on another. This is a minor annoyance, and one you usually have to put up with if there are 6 PCI slots (the motherboard can only be so long).

The AK35GTR has on board 5.1 audio care of C-Media's 8738 chip which seems quite popular. The nice thing is, it's a actual hardware based soundcard not some codec like the VIA AC'97! As far as sound quality goes, the C-Media chip is on par with the Sound Blaster Live! series of cards which are pretty good. The 5.1 audio works with every game we threw at it, with no hitches, Counter Strike, RTCW, MOHAA....

Highpoint IDE RAID:

The AK35GTR comes with the Highpoint HPT372 IDE RAID controller, which has Ultra/133 support and allows for RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. Unfortunately we didn't have any spare hard drives on hand to fully test the RAID features. Look for an update shortly.

Here's a brief explanation of the different RAID configurations.

RAID 0 is not considered a true RAID since, there's not data redundancy. What it does is take two drives of the same size/configuration and stripes them meaning it makes one big drive out of two smaller ones. This improve performance by cutting hard drive latency by 1/2 since the data is divided equally and written on the two hard drives and it also increases the data bandwidth by twice. The reason it's not considered a RAID is because if one drive fails, all data is lost.

RAID 1 mirrors two drives of the same size, in theory, if one drive fails, the other will take over as the primary hard drive and the system will operate as normal. This is what is supposed to happen with a SCSI hard drive setup and it actually works pretty well there. However with IDE it just allows for data redundancy, so the system usually does crash.

With RAID 0+1, you need four hard drives of the same configuration/size. What RAID 0+1 does is stripes two sets of two hard drives, one set for a RAID 0 configuration and the other for RAID 1. What this does is offer the best of both worlds, the high performance of RAID 0, with 100% data redundancy of RAID 1. Hence the name RAID 0+1. The only downside would be the need for four identical hard drives.

I was pleased to see Shuttle had included four DIMM slots. We didn't have four identical DIMM's for testing but I did try occupying all four slots and there were no stability problems at stock speeds to speak of Apparently, this is quite a feat since most DDR boards out there only have 3 DIMM slots for stability purposes.

Shuttle was able to engineer in a 4th slot, and without compromising stability! Good job! The DIMMS used were 256MB Apacer PC2100, 256MB Micron PC2100, 256MB OCZ PC2400 and 256MB Corsair XMS PC2400.