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Shuttle AN51R Review :: Features and Layout
As far as the layout of the board is concerned I see a board that looks a lot like every other board I have seen for this platform with the exception of the aqua colored PCB. Nothing stands out as a wow element and the board is pretty much standard faire in this department, with the coolest features being the restart button on the rear I/O and the on/off buttons on the board. The thing is though, these things are mainly cool for the gadget head testing the motherboard, but once the board is installed inside of a case they become pretty moot features, as unless the restart button on the case is broken you probably would never use them. The SB is cooled passively as are most boards in all fairness, but c'mon if you want to be the top dog go all out and use some active cooling for Pete's sake. The power cables are located in complete opposite directions on the board where optimal placement is together as to avoid cable mess. This is something that is the same as most boards as well and nothing too unusual.  12V Power  Passive Heatsink Based on NVIDIA's Nforce3 250+ chipset featuring a 1600MHz system bus and AMD's HyperTransport technology, the board supports the Socket 754 AMD Athlon64 series CPUs. Amazingly enough, the 754 platform has suddenly become very popular as well as being better supported by the manufacturers in a sudden and strange turn of events. When the 754 first came out manufacturers seemed very skeptical of making boards for this platform, but as Intel stumbled with the LGA775 release many have jumped on this wagon as an affordable and viable entity for the desktop market and hey, sales are moving. There are three 184-Pin DIMM slots supporting up to 3GB of PC1600/2100/2700/3200 DDR SDRAM and in single channel mode unlike the new 939, which supports dual-channel memory support. The performance difference between the single/dual-channel memory configurations is not too much and should not affect things from a user interface point of view. Memory management has always been in Intel's favor and only in the last few chipset releases have we seen AMD slowly creeping up the ladder to better memory management.  Socket 754 Interface  Memory  8X AGP Hard drive and optical drive support comes in a couple of different ways on the AN51R. For your SATA150 configuration you get support for four Serial ATA drives that function in the RAID 0, RAID 1 and the 0+1 Arrays. The location of the secondary SATA connections is rather strange as it is located above the AGP slot and will be rather difficult to connect when the VGA card is installed in its slot. As I sit here and look at this the more I feel this is not just a bad location for the connections, but a terrible one. What Shuttle was thinking when they decided to put that connection there is beyond me as it is horribly un-ergonomic and unusable when a high-end VGA card is installed. PATA or Parallel ATA as it has come to be known as, comes in the standard two channels design and supports drive transfer speeds of ATA 33/66/100/133 through its two connectors. The board also comes with support for external SATA150 via the Marvell 3020 chip that supports an additional dual-channel SATA connection from a bracket that was not included in the retail package.  SATA 1 and 2  SATA 3 AND 4  PCI Slots  Capacitors On-board audio comes provided by the Realtek ALC650 chipset. The chipset supports 6-channel 5.1 audio and also includes an SPDIF Digital connection for connecting to digitally supported speakers. The software offers the user the ability to change the microphone input and line in into a rear bass connection and center speaker connection. The Nforce3 250 chipset has a built-in SPDIF-OUT that supports a pass-through function for using external surround sound systems. There is one AGP 4/8X slot and five PCI slots for your discreet card support and a total of eight available USB 2.0 ports. Four USB ports are located on the rear I/O and four more connect by the included bracket that occupies one PCI slot bay at the back of your enclosure. Also on the rear I/O are the connections for the IEEE1394 interface and the RJ45 input for connecting to your internet or LAN environment. LAN support comes by way of the Broadcom 5788 GB LAN chipset providing 10Mbs/100Mbs/1000GB transfer rates and will automatically set itself to the proper settings depending on your LAN configuration. The board also comes with a bracket for an additional two IEEE1394 connections that also blocks another PCI slot. The board comes with all the required cables and rear I/O shield including a CD with all the drivers and needed software to get up and going. That wraps up what the board is and has to offer, but let's see how well it does in the lab.  Rear I/O  Content Contents:
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