Any things to look ouit for on the AK31A?

[Athlon4all]

I've got a Shuttle AK31A on the way to replace my dead K7S5A I'm just wondering if there's anything that I should look out for. Thanks guys!!!

 

[birddog]

I've had mine up & running for a few months now without a hitch. It is a nice simple, stable board. It is a rather large board (like all the new socket A boards), if you have a smallish case, the back of your CD-ROM drives may run into the board if they are in the lower drive bay's.

 

[Clevor]

I had one in my rig for a couple of days. Not a bad Athlon board. It overclocked better than an A7V266-E, KK266-R, and A7V133 I tried, with a TB and XP.

Mine was a little quirky, though. Would only run stable with optimal setting in BIOS. If I tried to manually adjust CAS settings, wouldn't run stable. Also another bug is the + voltage option in the BIOS does not work correctly. Only one of the + overvolt settings work, the others are dead. And you can only get around 1.85 max VCORE in the board. Thus I could only get around 140-150 FSB on both CPUs. I plan on volt modding to get 1.9, which should help.

Haven't kept up with the AK31a scene so not sure BIOS updates have fixed the problems. Check out the Shuttle section in the AMDMB.com forum.

 

[Natej]

Flawless

 

[Athlon4all]

Thanx so much guys for the input. Anybody else have any other comments to make?

 

[Buz2b]

You might want to look at (as I am doing) the OC Workbench Shuttle Forum. They seem to have migrated beyond many postings about the AK31 but there are many there that have good information. The only thing I can share is that I had difficulty setting up a Radeon LE video card; but that could be as much a problem with XP as anything else.

 

[Pabster]

The two biggest problems with AK31A are memory configuration and voltage. Most boards are 100% unstable with all DIMMs filled (even with the most conservative of timings), and this board suffers from severe voltage regulation troubles. Often times, you'll have to use one of the +x.xxxV settings in the BIOS just to get the core at (or even near!) default vCore. Last but not least, VIA KT266A. But I'm not going to delve any further on that

 

[Clevor]

VIA, love them or hate them, but I did a lot of research on top overclocking boards and the Epox and Abit guys all say the K7RA and 8KHA+ boards (both KT266a) are still the best performing boards out there for the Athlon. They say don't bother upgrading to the newer 8K3A or A7V333 boards.

 

[Buz2b]

Athlon4all:
From mucho online research that I have done (I was building one for my stepson), I found that the board is, for the most part, a stable AMD/DDR board. Yes, there have been some problems with this and that; voltage being the #1 issue. However, you should expect no "troublesme" issues. As far as hints go, I'd say check out the OC Workbench forum. There's lots of tidbits there; too many minor and major points to mention here. Nothing too major mind you, but good reading. Problem is, it will take some time to do that reading. But that is the best source of info you will find right now; all due respects to AT (my forum of choice) of course.

 

[ahsia]

Just build a AMD system with the AK31A with XP 1700+, was a breeze to put together and install. No overclocking though. In fact, I am building another this week. A very plesant experience.