What to watch for in the test results
We've elected to test the AK35GTR against several different contenders in order to give you a good picture of exactly where this board's performance stacks up against the competition and against Shuttle's past efforts.

In fact, although we've used VIA's KT266A chipset in a number of reviews and, heck, we've reviewed other KT266A motherboards, we've never really done a head-to-head chipset comparo between the KT266A and its predecessor. To make things interesting, we're including test results for Shuttle's AK31 board in two flavors: revision 2 (KT266) and revision 3.1 (KT266A). We've also thrown in VIA's KT266A reference mobo and one of the AK35GTR's toughest competitors, the extremely fast Epox EP-8KHA+.

Yep, it's a freaking bonanza. The motherboard equivalent of a road-house free-for-all.

Try to maintain bladder control.

You should be able to see exactly how the AK35GTR compares versus Shuttle's past efforts, versus VIA's KT266A reference platform, and versus the competition.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• ZD Media Business Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2001 1.0.2
• ScienceMark 1.0
• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 Build 200
• Quake III Arena 1.30

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.