SHUTTLE - Shuttle AN50R nForce3 150 Motherboard Review

The Crucible has reviewed Shuttle’s nForce3-150 based motherboard, the AN50R, rating it a Top Pick. Along with its ‘cool blue colour’, other plus points are stability, decent oveclocking options and low price:

The AN50R sports dual lan (one Intel Gigabit NIC and one 10/100 integrated into the nforce3 SPP, two IEEE 1394 firewire ports (VIA VT6306), six high speed USB 2.0 ports, Silicon Image SiL3112A SATA RAID controller (support for two SATA drives), and Realtek ALC650 (AC’97 CODEC) 6 channel sound. Overall quite a nice bundle, other than the Realtek sound which was a bit of a disappointment. The AN50R has five full length 32-bit PCI slots and one AGP 3.0 compliant slot supporting upto 8X AGP device. Other than that the AN50R has your standard dual ATA133 IDE headers, one floppy connector, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, one serial and parallel port and an optical SPDIF port for connection to a high end audio output device.

..For the average gamer looking to jump into the Athlon64 market I would highly recommend the AN50R. The board is very stable and reasonably fast. It is roomy and has a plethora of extra options. You will however want to add in a Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS or some other high end sound card though. The onboard sound was mediocre at best. Even without voltage modifications, this board is great as overclocking goes. With the addition of some extra available volts I am sure that this puppy could fly. Beating our previous best speed of 233Mhz fsb was quite a feat, give the limited voltage options supplied. Goes to show that some times more is not always better.

the Crucible
Shuttle AN50R (Nvidia nForce3 150)