The motherboard manufacturer of a thousand faces, if you were to grant this title to any single manufacturer in the industry it would be best molded to the features of Shuttle, a manufacturer that has managed to produce enough motherboards that their user base could be considered to be one of the most diverse in the industry.

Shuttle has manufactured motherboards ranging from low-end Socket-7 and Slot-1/Socket-370 boards to the most competitive of Pentium III ready BX motherboard products, unfortunately, like many other mainboard manufacturers, Shuttle chose to leave out a unique faction of users by producing single processor motherboards alone.  For those interested in multiprocessor systems, regardless of their faith in Shuttle, the only option was to pursue the Supermicro, Tyan or maybe even the ASUS offerings of the time. 

Shuttle's realization of this weakness in their market concentration inspired the latest addition to the seemingly exponentially growing Shuttle mainboard product line, the HOT-649A.  Shuttle has, in the past, won awards and incredible praise and recognition for their efforts on AnandTech among other on-line publications, however how well did the already successful company make the transition from standard desktop motherboards to the high-end multiprocessor world?   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

Placed along the top edges of both slot-1 interface connectors are rows of electrolytic capacitors, often associated with greater stability depending on their physical location.  Shuttle's positioning of the 443BX controller chip nearly flush against the memory banks, separated only by a couple of capacitors, should virtually eliminate the need for an external DRAM buffer when weighing capacitance issues with 4 installed DIMMs.  On the opposite side of the slot-1 connectors are two thermal sensors, which form the basis of Shuttle's intelligent monitoring features present on the HOT-649A. 

The 649A features Shuttle's latest 150MHz clock generator allowing for FSB speeds of 140/150MHz to be achieved, as well as unique "in-between" settings such as 115MHz and 120MHz for those users that are primarily viewing the 649A as a possible workstation motherboard, with overclocking as a possibility.  The FSB settings and clock multipliers can be controlled entirely on the motherboard itself through the use of a few good ol' jumpers (we all remember what those are), however Shuttle does allow for an automatic configuration of the CPU clock multiplier through a single jumper block as with most of their newer BX boards. 

Shuttle included a 68-pin Ultra2 SCSI cable with a LVD (Low Voltage Differential) terminator in the 649A bundle, coupling that with the driver disks and CD-ROM for the SCSI controller as well as the motherboard itself, Shuttle tops it all off with their classic Installations Guide pamphlet that documents the meat of the motherboard's features in an easy to reach place.

From a performance perspective, under Windows NT 4, the HOT-649A followed the trend motherboards have produced in the past couple of years, in that its performance stuck to the mean as close as possible.  For an evaluation of multiprocessor vs single processor performance under Windows NT take a look at AnandTech's Multiprocessor coverage here.

The Bad

Shuttle has a habit of sticking connectors in the most random places on their motherboards.  A perfect example can be found here with the 649A, although they tried to keep the SCSI connectors out of the way of the peripheral expansion slots, any installed full-length cards would present an obstacle for the SCSI cables requiring the user to run them up and around the tail of the card, not always a comfortable experience, especially if you have a limited cable length to work with.  Another example being the placement of the third and fourth 3-pin fan connectors, both placed in between two expansion slots on the motherboard, a place that is extremely difficult to reach regardless of what is installed in your system.

The overall stability of the HOT-649A was a notch below that of the flagship Supermicro and Tyan products AnandTech has tested, which although still makes the board an incredibly stable product, does point out the fact that there is an obvious stability gap between Shuttle's first attempt at a dual processor board, and the latest offerings from those that have been in the market longer.

A bone to pick with Shuttle's implementation of their "auto-detecting" CPU speed feature is that the "auto-detect" is only applicable for clock multipliers (which, with clock locked processors, is already made possible on the processor's end) and not for FSB settings.  So the FSB settings must be manually selected by a jumper block in the far corner of the board, in an extremely cramped area (especially when installed in a case), making adjusting FSB settings a bit of an ordeal unless done prior to the installation of the motherboard.

One con to any motherboard with on-board Adaptec SCSI right now is the inflated cost of on-board SCSI due to Adaptec's price increase, you can expect to pay a considerable premium for any motherboards with this feature from now on, and with the lack of any major dual processor boards without on-board SCSI (excluding those models from Supermicro), you have very few options in this area.

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

The Final Decision

Shuttle made an excellent attempt at their first dual-processor Pentium II motherboard, unfortunately in this highly competitive market, making an "excellent attempt" isn't always good enough.  There are simply too many options in this market to opt for the HOT-649A over the competition, in the event that the price is right, the HOT-649A isn't a "bad" motherboard, just one that could stand for a little improving.  Hopefully Shuttle's next dual processor concoction will be a little more on the competitive side of things. 

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