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I just recently purchased a Shuttle AK35GTR mobo from newegg.com and it arrived on Wednesday and I installed it. After mounting, attaching necessary cables and wires and such I go to start setting up the BIOS and loading the OS. I also redid my RAID array (deleted and created a new array). Upon loading Win XP my preformance was plain shitty. Also with some BSODs I decided to try Win2k. I loaded up Win2k and the same damn thing happened! What was really weird was I had redone the master/slave/IDE cabling of my harddrives. I think they were done as the same as my original array (before deletion) b/c I entered Win2k setup and my partitions from before were there....very weird. So I did Maxtor's low level format thingy and then tried, and got errors with formatting....I'm really pissed now, upon running an updated utility my drive had an error and it turned out to be fixable. So it's all fixed and I go to install Win2k. It works! Finally, I thought. Starts working and then BSOD. Crap. Maybe it was a one time thing. Rebooted and what do you know? BSOD. So i move some cards around (the AK35GTR has some weird ass IRQ management). Reboot and get in Win2k, no BSODs with anything. Go today about 5PM or so and try to play some Jedi Knight 2. 15 minutes into the game BSOD. At this point I'm pissed off completely. So I backup necessities and went to reinstall Win2k. That was at 6:30. I finally got a copy installed about 8:00 (numerous BSODs during setup) and what happens every time inside the GUI? BSOD on ntfs.sys. So I tried again to reinstall Win2k. Got through all of the non-GUI setup and went to the GUI setup and the upon selecting my network settings and allowing setup to continue, it froze at Configuring COM+.....Not the comp but Win2k setup....sat there forever and never moved. CTRL+ALT+DEL didn't work but I could move the mouse. So i reset and try to continue. It gets to the last screen with the 4 different steps and it stops going during the Registering Components step, same as it did before on COM+. I went through shit like that for probably an hour hoping it would work. Currently, my Shuttle AK35GTR is sitting in the box, ready to be packed and shipped back to Newegg for either a refund or return for another product and I will pay the difference between the two. I'm thinking Abit b/c I know Abit is good. MSI boards look interesting but they use Promise RAID, and my RAID is setup on a Highpoint and therefore data loss would happen = bad!

Anyways sorry for the long rant, just needed to let off some steam.

I am sorry to hear about your probs... MY AK35GTR has been faultless. But I once had an Microstar board that was nothing but misery from the time I opened the box.... I RMA'ed it.

Abit.... Hmm. Personally, I have never had an Abit board last more than 6 months... Certainly feature packed boards and lots of people love em, but I am not going there again...

There is a good shuttle forum at http://www.amdmb.com. You might try posting there...

Sooner or later, everybody gets a bad board out of the box....

I've been at amdmb.com, multiple times. Didn't see anything related. Searched Shuttle's newgroup, VIA Arena, VIA Hardware. Many places. I've decided to go ahead and get the KT333 chipset for my next board. The EPoX 8K3A+ is looking like the prime selection. All other boards have a Promise RAID controller and Abit's KT333 RAID board isn't available at newegg (wanna just try and return Shuttle and pay difference instead of doing refunds and such).

I dont know if it were me I think I would give Shuttle another try. Every board manufacture has bad boards make it to the end user, and it sounds like you were unlucky enough to get one of Shutles. The AK35GTR certainly looks like a good board and the reviews I have read think so too. Personally I would give it another chance. I have a Soyo Dragon Plus and the first one I got was bad. I returned it, got another one and have been happy every since. Good luck with what ever you decide to do.

Have you ever thought about ram issues possibly? Don't know how much ram your running but run 1 stick and turn your ram timings down... the 1T/2T command would be a good one for starts... If that board support Vmem adj. bump it up by a tenth or 2. Too me it almost sounds like there is a problem with memory.

That's a drag. My Shuttle AK35GTR lasted about a week. Worked great until I decided to swap out a fan/HS. Went to boot it back up and ......NADA. dunno what happened but it was a goner. RMA'd it and then traded the replacement AK35GTR to Nexus_7. Working great for him last I heard. I picked up a refurb'd KR7A-RAID for 89 bux and I've been happy ever since. LOVE my Abit.

Originally posted by dadx2mj
I dont know if it were me I think I would give Shuttle another try. Every board manufacture has bad boards make it to the end user, and it sounds like you were unlucky enough to get one of Shutles. The AK35GTR certainly looks like a good board and the reviews I have read think so too. Personally I would give it another chance. I have a Soyo Dragon Plus and the first one I got was bad. I returned it, got another one and have been happy every since. Good luck with what ever you decide to do.

Knowing the way I am I'll probably have the Shuttle in my comp sometime this weekend trying it out again. I was really disappointed when I found out that I just could not get Win2k to install. Really made me mad. It all depends on what newegg is going to let me do. If I can change for an Abit mobo, which I'll probably just go with an Abit, maybe the KT333 RAID board will be out soon that or I'll just go with the KR7A-133RAID.

Have you ever thought about ram issues possibly? Don't know how much ram your running but run 1 stick and turn your ram timings down... the 1T/2T command would be a good one for starts... If that board support Vmem adj. bump it up by a tenth or 2. Too me it almost sounds like there is a problem with memory.

Nope, because that was done automatically by SPD so therefore I never thought about it. Very weird stuff. Again I'll probably play around some more this weekend.

check the 1t/2t settings on the ram - on my ak31 the default was 1t - had probs changed it to 2t no more probs

It justs get weirder yet better. I'm typing this message from the Shuttle in Win2k. I reinstalled it, and went to load up Win2k and BAM everything worked fine. I did change the 1T to 2T just for the hell of it, hoping to not get any blue screens this time around. Downloading 3D Mark 2001SE to loop it for a little bit, hoping it will work and not BSOD.