Shuttle AK31 - Slow performance

[RazB]

Hey guys, a relative bought this configured with an 80 gig Maxtor 7200, AMD XP2000,AIW Radeon 8500, 512 DDR from Cyberpowerpc. I was expecting this thing to be the fastest machine on earth but the hard drive and video score average on various benchmarks. We've loaded the latest Via 4 in 1's with little luck. Anyone have any experience with this board?

 

[o1die]

I would go to the shuttle website, and check to see what is the latest bios version for the board. Then reboot, and the bios number will be displayed at the top of the screen. If yours if different, I would download it from the shuttle website, and save in documents file. Click on the award icon, and 4 or 5 files will be created. Then click on the awdflash icon, and wait 30-45 seconds for the file to load (dont'do or touch anything while it's loading). When it's finished, a white rectangle will appear on the screen, saying the file has been loaded. Reboot into the bios, save and exit. Then reboot again, and check your bios settings. I don't have a copy of mine in front of me ( I switched to a different mobo to run the p4 1.6a), so it's a little hard to remember all the settings. In the "frequency control/voltage" section, try changing the cpu clock to 138. Then check the settings in the "advanced chipset features". Under "advanced dram control", change to "manual", enable "4 bank interleaving", "agp fast writes", and try running at "case"= 2, instead of 2.5. You will have to experiment with the settings, and see what works best with your cpu and memory. Good luck.

 

[RazB]

Thanx oldie......I didn't think about flashing the BIOS. I guess I figured (silly me) that an out of the box machine would be the lastest and greatest. The one thing I have learned though is ..CYBERPOWERPC = LAME, regardless of price. Tech support is M-F west coast business hours and Mondays are shot because they're hammered with people who had problems over the weekend. ALSO, the phone just rings busy, it doesn't put you in a wait que.

 

[RossGr]

The memory SPD settings do not work on this mobo, you need to set them up manually. You should be able to find the settings by doing a search of threads in this forum. Good luck

 

[RazB]

thanx for all the input guys....the odd thing about this machine is that the only two areas that benchmark slow are the uncached speed(insinuating hard drive performance) and video score. The memory and processor rate out of this world. I thought the 4 in 1's may have been the issue. (man I love my simple K7S5A SIS 735) or possibly the 80 gig MAXTOR. I'll try some of the tweaks and see what happens. PS - I believe the Bios is the next to last version..