Shuttle SS51 XPC - A True High Performance Small Form Factor PC

The Motherboard - Shuttle's FS51

Click to Enlarge

The FS51 is the heart and soul of the SS51 XPC, it's Shuttle's small form factor motherboard. As we've mentioned before, the motherboard is based on the SiS 651 chipset, comprised of the SiS 651 North Bridge and the SiS 962 South Bridge.

The SiS 651 North Bridge supports the 533MHz FSB, AGP 4X and DDR333; what sets the 651 apart from other SiS P4 chipsets is the integrated SiS 315 video core. The AGP 4X controller in the 651 North Bridge is what drives the external AGP 4X slot on the FS51. The FS51 supports all currently available Pentium 4 CPUs and it should have no problem supporting future speeds.

The SiS memory controller powers the two DIMM slots on the FS51 motherboard; the memory bus frequency is controlled from within the Award BIOS setup.

The SiS 962 South Bridge is much like the 963 which we just wrote about in our SiS 648 Review. The 962 includes a 6 port USB 2.0 controller and a 3-port IEEE-1394a (Firewire) controller in addition to the usual features (AC'97 audio, Ethernet MAC, ATA/133 controllers) that you can expect from a South Bridge. The highly integrated nature of the 962 South Bridge makes it the perfect candidate for the FS51's role in an XPC.