Intro

When I hear someone mention products from Shuttle, I automatically think of their kick-ass micro ATX systems. Shuttle isn't completely one dimensional though, they also make full sized ATX motherboards for both Intel and AMD platforms. Based upon my first experience with one of their full sized ATX motherboards, I suspect that all of us will be hearing a lot more about Shuttle boards aimed at the enthusiast crowd.

The Shuttle board I'm reviewing here is the AN51R which is based upon the nVidia nForce3 250 chipset designed for AMD Athlon 64 socket 754 CPU's. Shuttle researchers must have been prowling a few enthusiast forums when they designed this board because they have integrated features that I've never seen in any other motherboard, some that are obviously aimed directly at the overclocking crowd. The AN51R has garnered many favorable reviews in Europe, let's check out how well it would do on the American market.

Package

The AN51R arrived packaged in a rather nondescript box. Inside, there was an instruction manual, a RAID manual, backplate, driver disk, IEEE-1394 PCI slot adapter, USB PCI slot adapter, SATA cable, 80 pin IDE cable, and a floppy cable. The USB and Firewire adapter both contain two ports each. The manual states that there was supposed to be an additional serial cable and two serial power adapters, but they weren't included. I'm not going to gig Shuttle for this though, the board isn't readily available in the U.S. yet and I could tell that this one had been re-packed. I would like to applaud Shuttle for the excellent press kit that was included, it makes a reviewers life a lot easier to have a quick reference to all the features.

The Motherboard

There isn't anything too exceptional about the layout of the AN51R. Even though there are plenty of capacitors near the CPU socket, they are low enough where almost all heatsinks would clear it. The ATX connector, IDE1 and 2, and floppy connector are all conveniently bundled near the top back of the board which makes wire management easier, but once again, the 4 pin 12V connector is located clear across the board right below the CPU socket. I just cannot understand why manufacturers can't place this connector closer to the ATX power connector. There are three fan connectors; one top, one center, and one bottom. The AN51R features four, count 'em, four SATA ports that support RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. One pair is located just above the AGP slot and the other pair is near beneath the IDE ports. The AN51R also supports RAID on the IDE ports.