Shuttle HOT-683 LX Socket-370 Preview

The Bad

In spite of the fact that Shuttle took their classic "please all" approach to the expansion on the HOT-683, 1999 should be the year of 5 or more PCI slots, and the 4 PCI slots of the HOT-683 just won't cut it for most newer users.  Those of you with older ISA peripherals that you want to bring over to your new system will find the 3 ISA slots quite appealing, but just wait until you decide it's time to add a SCSI card, or another Voodoo2, or an Ethernet card, PCI real estate is hard to come by on this motherboard.

Shuttle, once again, finds the most remote locations to place the jumper blocks and the 3-pin fan connectors on the board.   Between the 1st and 2nd PCI slots is the board's SB-Link connector, between the next two PCI slots is the CPU configuration jumper block, between the next two is a case fan connector, and placed almost flush up against the AGP slot is another 3-pin fan connector...can we say poorly designed?  The rest of the layout is fine, just plan on removing some peripheral cards if you ever plan on installing another case fan.

A feature greatly missed from the HOT-683 was the presence of any voltage adjustment technology as is present on a few other Socket-370 boards.  With the HOT-683, you're stuck at 2.0v core, which tremendously damages your overclocking reliability if you happen to be pushing a lower yield Celeron up to 450MHz or above depending on the model.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.mushkin.com

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

How I Tested

• Each benchmark was run a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5 times, if the motherboard failed to complete a single test within the 5 allocated test runs the OS/Software was re-installed on a freshly formatted Hard Drive and the BIOS settings were adjusted to prevent the test from failing again.  All such encounters were noted at the exact time of their occurrence.

• Business Winstone 98 & 3D Winbench 98 was run at each individually tested clock speed, if reliable scores were achieved with the first two test runs of the suite an average of the two was taken and recorded as the final score at that clock speed.  If the test system displayed erratic behavior while the tests were running or the results were incredibly low/high the tests were re-run up to 5 times and an average of all the test runs was taken and recorded at the final score at that clock speed

• All video tests were conducted using an AGP video accelerator

• No foreign drivers were present in the test system other than those required for the system to function to the best of its ability

• All foreign installation files were moved to a separate partition during the test as to prevent them from effecting the test results

• All tests were conducted at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color

• Quake 2 tests were conducted at 800 x 600 x 16-bit color in Software Rendering Mode