The day of the BX chipset has come and is on its way out, in the upcoming months Intel's newest chipsets, including the unreleased Camino, and a major investment into the production of a high end BX board now would be on the futile level of a manufacturing decision. At the same time, there is a fine line between rushing to get yet another product out on the market that will be obsolete in a matter of months, and rushing to get a more improved product out on the market to satisfy a company's faithful users.

Determining Shuttle's motives behind the creation of their latest BX based motherboard, the HOT-663, is up to you, but in the end the quality, and effort that went into producing yet another Shuttle mainboard remains obvious.

If you're looking to buy a new BX board, does the HOT-663 really offer any advantages over the current leaders of the pack? Let's find out...

New Anand Tech Report Card Rating
83/C+

Do not compare newer ratings to older ones, the newer ratings are much more aggressive

The Good

A little under two years ago, the hottest topic among hardware enthusiasts looking to upgrade their motherboards was the new jumperless CPU setup offered by a fairly unknown company named ABIT. Since then, it seems like just about every manufacturer has their own version of ABIT's SoftMenu Jumpess CPU Setup, Shuttle included. Shuttle's HOT-663 starts off with the ability to auto-detect the CPU installed in your system, as well as a tweakable semi-jumperless setup. By setting a jumper block to Auto, you can configure the clock multipliers and FSB settings within the Award BIOS Setup. By default, the motherboard will auto-detect whether or not you have a 100MHz FSB processor installed (P2 350/400/450), however this can be overridden through the use of the jumpered setup of the 663.

Shuttle's HOT-663 comes documented in the usual Shuttle style, with a quick installation guide shipping on the standard Shuttle manual pamphlet, and the usual set of drivers and installation tools present on the bundled CD-ROM. The board's documentation, and the ease of its jumperless setup should make the 663's installation a breeze for even the most novice of users.

The layout of the HOT-663 is classic Shuttle, the 4/3/1 (PCI/ISA/AGP) expansion slot configuration leaves enough room for the single AGP slot to be complemented by the 4 SDRAM DIMM slots, as well as a few other features including a temperature monitor, a must have for just about any motherboard today. Running parallel to the DIMM slots are the HDD/FDD interface ports, and wedged between them is the ATX power connector. Overall, the layout is a bit crowded, however it allows for everything to be accessible for the most part.

The board features a total of 4 - 3 pin on-board fan connectors, to keep even the most powerful of Glacier cooling fans running just fine off of the motherboard itself. Towards the right edge of the board is the front panel connector block which is as crowded as you'll find, however the overly crowded nature of the board comes courtesy of the on-board Yamaha PCI audio chip and wavetable synthesizer. The I/O ports on the rear of the motherboard include the MIDI/Game port, as well as the audio in/out ports courtesy of that on-board Yamaha chip.

For system integrators that aren't looking to provide their users with the absolute best in audio quality, yet are looking for a cost effective and high performance solution with on-board audio, the HOT-663 is the answer to quite a few of your prayers. With most Pentium II boards that are coming out with on-board audio geared towards the low cost/low performance market (i.e. a 2 PCI/2 ISA based EX board) it is a welcome change to see average on-board sound tossed onto an already solid, fully capable BX motherboard design.

The performance of the HOT-663 is up to par with Shuttle's previous releases, however as the BX motherboard market has already showed us, performance is the last consideration you need to make when purchasing a motherboard.

The 24 hour burn in stability test proved the Shuttle HOT-663 to be worthy of a commendation, however there is much room for improvement as the HOT-663 did pose quite a few bones this reviewer could help but pick with Shuttle about.

The Bad

It seemed like Shuttle couldn't help but include that fourth fan connector, and they placed it in the most difficult to reach place on the motherboard, between the last PCI slot and the AGP slot, making plugging in a fan in a crowded case a bit of a pain. The rest of the fan connectors are in equally populated areas, and reaching them is a bit of a problem.

The Yamaha PCI audio does occupy its own set of IRQ/DMA channels, and taking advantage of all of the available PCI/ISA slots and leaving the on-board audio disabled can provide for an interesting experience, and in this respect, the HOT-663 isn't intended for many novice users. Over time, as you add more and more components to your HOT-663 based system, the installation procedure for future components may become a bit more difficult as conflicts arise.

Speaking on the expansion slots, in a world dominated by 5 PCI slot based motherboards, Shuttle's constant choice to opt for a 4 PCI/3 ISA slot configuration eliminates a large portion of their potential market, however the inclusion of the on-board PCI audio does detract from this oversight somewhat.

The stability of the HOT-663 could be improved in comparison to other motherboards, a problem some high end users may run into is a capacitance problem when making use of all four DIMM slots, especially with the lack of any memory buffer, but for the normal user, the board was about as stable as you'll need it to be.

USB Compatibility

• Number of 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

• 3D Winbench 98 tests were double buffered and conducted at 800 x 600 x 16-bit color

The Final Decision

As a BX board that should've come out a year ago, the HOT-663 is a knockout, however as a BX motherboard that is making its way onto the market at the end of 1998, the 663 doesn't leave the market with a bang, it's a good board, but a little too late to go head to head with ABIT's BH6, ASUS' P2B, or AOpen's AX6BC.

How it Rates

The New Rating System
Each motherboard is rated in 8 areas, Performance, Price, Ease of Use, Overclocked Stability, Stability, Quality, Documentation, and Reliability.

Do not compare newer scores to older ones, the newer scores are much more aggressive

• Performance - How well the motherboard compares to others in its class

• Price - How competitive the price of the motherboard is when compared to others in its class

• Ease of Use - How easy it is to setup the motherboard, jumper settings, jumperless configuration etc...

• Overclocked Stability - How stable the motherboard is at overclocked CPU/Bus speeds

• Stability - How stable the motherboard is at normal CPU/Bus speeds

• Quality - How much effort went into producing the motherboard

• Documentation - How helpful is the manual and bundled support manuals

• Reliability - How long will this motherboard last, will it fail? Deals with quantity/size of capacitors, known bugs, etc...

• Overall Rating - an average of the eight above areas