Layout and features
Top to bottom, left to right, that's our way here at Hexus. The main 21-pin ATX power connector is in an ideal location well away from any trouble. My only slight gripe is that it becomes a shade difficult to remove system RAM once it is in place. Likewise, the floppy drive port is in a sensible location. I also like the placement of the 12v 4-pin connector, well out of harm's way.
The Socket 478 socket is a little further down this motherboard than most, although this poses no real problems. There is just about enough room to mount a larger class of cooler such as an Alpha or Swiftech.
The SiS648 Northbridge is passively cooled by a reasonable heatsink. 3 DDR DIMMS, capable of supporting 3GB of PC2100 or 2GB of PC2700 memory, are in their expected positions. It's all nice and neat so far.
The AGP slot is unique in that it supports AGP /4x/8x cards at 1.5v, it also has an in-built protection against the use of older 3.3v cards. I'm a little miffed that there's no card locking mechanism implemented. The SiS963 Southbridge is also passively cooled, the first time I've seen this on a SiS-based motherboard. The bottom left of the AS45GTR is a busy and interesting place, time to have a closer look.
The increasingly common Highpoint HPT372 IDE hardware RAID controller makes an appearance, we've previously seen this incarnation specified on a number of ABIT and EPoX motherboards recently. Supporting RAID0, RAID1, and RAID0+1 modes, with ATA133 compatibility, it is a more flexible solution than the competing Promise Lite controllers.
See the two small ICs to the right of the above picture ?, these are the controllers for the new serial ATA standard. The two connections to the right of the RAID ports are the the S-ATA ports. Small, eh ?. We'll have to wait for true S-ATA drives to ship before we can evaluate their performance. The separate on-board Realtek RTL8801 Firewire controller sits to the left of the RAID ports. Just above and to the right sit two buttons which are invaluable to a tester. They serve as on-board power and reset buttons, very handy if you're not using a standard case.
Speaking of Firewire, we have 3 headers on the right of the above picture. We are given a bracket that can use 2 of the headers. I'm interested to know why Shuttle chose to run a separate IC for Firewire duties considering there's one in-built to the SiS963 SB. Two USB2.0 headers, bringing the total available to 6, are shown above left.
The ALC650 on-board sound solution has been gaining momentum of late, mainly due to its 6-channel support and more than passable sound. It's definite a cut above the standard AC '97 CODECs. The supplied centre / bass cable connects to the CN7 header.
The back panel is regular enough with the usual serial, COM ports, and sound ports. The 2 USB ports are of USB2.0 specification, incidentally. The overall features are pretty good, about the best I've seen on SiS-based motherboard, and marred only by the lack of on-board LAN.
