Shuttle AE22 (Intel i815E)

The Shuttle AE22 is certainly not a rocket but then, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to set it up either. As one of the easiest to configure boards around the AE22 justifies its existence in the market place as a good-natured, entry level board for the average or OEM user.

That doesn't mean that the board cannot be improved. Among the easiest things to do would be to clean out the incorrect settings in the BIOS and substitute the correct values for the wrong FSB settings. Sure enough, many people still buy their computers according to the clock speed but the backside of the coin is that in a competitive world, even nominally high clock speed cannot mask the performance weakness if the board runs actually slower than specified. Other settings that should be corrected in the BIOS are the inaccurate memory timing settings, the cache settings and the fail-safe / optimal performance settings. It would probably not hurt either, to clean out the typos. Advanced improvements would encompass voltage adjustments to facilitate overclocking.

I realize that there has been quite a bit of criticism in this review but there are always different aspects to different pieces of hardware. In this case, most of the negative comments arise from the fact that the AE22 is a beautifully laid out board that runs perfectly stable within specs but this is exactly why it is frustrating that it wasn't possible to push it a little higher.