Shuttle AB60/RS (865PE) Motherboard

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

BIOS Configuration:

The Shuttle BIOS is very easy to navigate and there are a decent amount of options for the enthusiasts. In the Advanced Chipset Menu, you can see that there are options to be able to change the memory timings such as CAS Latency and Active to Precharge. These timings can increase the performance of the memory but can also cause instability for inexperienced users. Also in this menu we see a few other option like System BIOS Cacheable and Video BIOS Cacheable. Generally speaking, disabling these option will give better performance in top of the line machines.

The PC Health menu shows all of the system vitals. Here you can monitor fan speeds, temperatures, and voltages. There is also an option to set up a Shutdown Temperature, which will automatically shut down the PC when the CPU reaches the selected temperature. This is a nice safety net for people who are paranoid about their CPUs burning up due to a bad heatsink or fans. In other BIOSes, we have seen options to set up other safety nets such as alarms and fan failure shutdown. We do not see those options in the BIOS for this particular motherboard.

Here are the options that the overclockers will be interested to see. The FSB can only be set from 100 to 233 in 1 MHz increments. There are no BIOS updates at the time of this review, so perhaps we might see some higher options in the future since 233 is very low considering there are 845PE boards that allow for higher FSB's. The CPU voltage only goes to as high as 1.5875V, which is definitely not enough voltage for someone who is a hardcore overclocker. 1.85V or so would have been a much better option and would appeal more to the enthusiast but no one ever said Shuttle was out to please the overclockers. The DRAM voltage can be set to as high as 2.75V, which isn't really bad but again we feel that 3V would have been nice but maybe we are asking for too much.

Overall the BIOS allows for mild overclocks and with the limit on the FSB options, you won't really need the higher voltages. Hopefully there will be a BIOS revision with better FSB options and voltages.