Shuttle AB60/RS (865PE) Motherboard

Company: Shuttle
Product: AB60/RS
Street Price: Unknown
Date Reviewed: June 30, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Onboard Features:

As usual, we like to start with the rear I/O configuration. The I/O configuration on this motherboard is nothing to get excited about. In the picture you can see that there are two PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, two serial ports, a parallel port, four USB ports, and the audio jacks. In case you have not noticed already, this board lacks support for onboard LAN. This is interesting since most of the newer boards come with this basic feature. Also there are no FireWire ports on the I/O configuration. However, the board does support IEEE 1394 FireWire with the VIA 6306 chip. The two ports can be found on an extra bracket. On another bracket you can find two extra USB ports, which makes a total of six ports bundled with the AB60/RS.

Like most of the i865PE and i875P mainbaords, there are two Serial ATA connectors located to the bottom right of the ICH5 (Southbridge). We have discussed many times why the Serial ATA provided by the chipset is better than Serial ATA bound to the PCI bus. If you look below the ICH5, you'll see the Silicon Image 3112 SATALink chip. This chip allows support for two more independent SATA devices. It also provides support for RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. This is a really nice addition to the board since SATA will be the industry standard, phasing out IDE. Some of the other high-end motherboards, like the ABIT IC7-G, use this chip.

Shuttle has decided to use the VIA VT6306 chip to provide the motherboard with its IEEE 1394 FireWire support. The chip supports up to three independent IEEE 1394 devices. There are many devices that use FireWire, especially digital camcorders. The FireWire allows for transfer rates up to 400 Mbps. Other features of IEEE 1394 FireWire are the plug and play abilities as well as hot swapping. We always like to see some sort of FireWire support, which Shuttle has provided with the AB60/RS.

Here is a chip a lot of you should be familiar with. The Realtek ALC650 chip is an 18-bit, full duplex AC'97 2.2 compatible stereo audio CODEC. This is a pretty common chip on motherboards today. It is not going to provide the best sound in the world but it is decent. The more of an enthusiast you are, the more it is likely that you will get a sound card such as the Creative Labs Audigy. For basic use, the onboard sound should be fine.

Some things that we would have liked to have seen on this motherboard are onboard LAN capabilities and the use of the CSA (communications streaming architecture) bus. The new bus with a Gigabit LAN chip would be a really nice addition, since the CSA bus is perfect for Gigabit LAN. Of course Gigabit availability is low at the moment and very costly. You could still run a network within your home using a Gigabit switch. Also it would have been nice to just go ahead and add the FireWire onto the rear I/O configuration rather than having to use an extra bracket. I know there are a few users out there who like to have the use of all of their PCI slots and if you use the USB bracket and the FireWire brackets, then you automatically lose the use of two slots.