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| Shuttle HOT661V The Twin With A V (as in victory) | ||
| (Review by bighammer, edited by MS, February 2, 1999) |
There is one definite advantage to the PentiumII and Celeron CPUs, at least from the standpoint of motherboard manufacturers. Nobody has to worry about the on-board level 2 cache and it’s possible failure at higher bus speeds. In other words, it appears relatively easier to design a mainboard when the real problem child is already integrated into the CPU itself and does not need to be carefully placed not too close to the CPU but certainly not too far from it either. If this is a trivial statement, it has certainly some validity from the standpoint of the designer since the time to develop new boards is effectively shortened. Furthermore, the well-known worries about bad or too slow batches of cache chips no longer affect the successful manufacturing and marketing process of a new mainboard.
Among the technical considerations that need to be taken into account, the two probably the most crucial are stability and, maybe more important the technical limitations. There is only a marginal gain in performance in Slot 1 systems with higher bus speeds. Still, there is an increasing demand for higher FSB frequencies, partially caused by the clock locks on all current Slot 1 CPUs. The limitation in this case is mainly the lack of memory modules capable of keeping up with the system. Here is where the VIA Apollo chipset offers an easy workaround by allowing the user to select the AGP frequency for the memory bus. In addition, even though none of the current boards has implemented this feature yet, the Apollo Pro is the only one of the three available chipsets that is currently supporting the new UDMA 66 mode, and activating this feature may, in the future, become possible through a BIOS update, should compatible storage devices hit the shelves. Jumperless setting of the FSB is yet another feature and so far we have seen it only on Intel BX chipset powered boards. Still, who says you can't do the same on a VIA Apollo Pro board?
All in all, since the chipset itself looks good, let’s take a good looking board and see where the pros and cons are. The candidate is none other than the latest Shuttle Slot1 creation in ATX factor, the HOT 661V
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