Introduction
SHUTTLE AN35N NFORCE2 ULTRA 400
Shuttle may be better known to most of us from their expanding line of small-form-factor PCs. These small cubes, often with stylish looks and an exceptional feature set, have almost started an industry of accessories on their own. However, a quick perusal of Shuttle's 'sites tells us that they do far more than produce these cute cubes. Indeed, have a close look and you'll see that Shuttle produce a number of motherboards based on both Intel and AMD processors.
We've seen a number of Shuttle boards pass through our labs in the last year. We'd characterise their mainboards as stable, cheap and generally fast. They usually forego all the possible extras in the name of cost, so we never expect to see, say, MSI-like bundles. You may or may not be aware that the graphics card giant, NVIDIA, recently distinguished their line of nForce2 boards into single and dual-channel camps. Single-channel memory implementation, naturally, is cheaper and usually performs to within a few percentage points of the premier dual-channel outfit. What both architectures have in common, though, is the ability to run each and every Athlon XP processor, and that includes the new-fangled 200FSB Bartons.
We've already seen EPoX's nForce2 Ultra 400 board's impressive performance and feature set, so it was only a matter of time until other manufacturers plied the market with their interpretations. Shuttle have their new performance S462 board out now. Let's see just how good the Shuttle AN35N Ultra is. Time to give it the once over.
