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

The tiny ALC650 codec next to the tower of 1/8" jacks

The AC'97 link on the motherboard is the latest from Avance Logic (a brand of Realtek), the ALC650. The ALC650 is a 6-channel AC'97 codec that drives the optical and analog audio ports on the outside of the SS51. Using the ALC650's driver control panel you can remap the three 1/8" ports on the I/O panel of the motherboard to be used as analog 5.1 outputs.

Finally, an AGP slot

The board features two expansion slots, a single PCI slot and the AGP 4X slot that adds so much value to the SS51 offering. Because of the highly integrated nature of the motherboard, Shuttle can get away with only a single PCI slot. On-board Firewire, USB 2.0, 6-channel audio and Ethernet leaves very little else to be desired, but if necessary you can use the remaining PCI slot for a SCSI controller or anything else that is missing from the FS51 board.

The FS51's Award BIOS allows for jumperless adjustment of the FSB frequency in 1MHz increments, as well as lets you choose the memory operating frequency for DDR200, DDR266 or DDR333 speeds.

As impressive as the layout and features of the FS51 motherboard are, it is the motherboard that ended up being our biggest complaint about the SS51. Initially in our testing the FS51 would not install Windows XP with ACPI enabled in the BIOS. A BIOS update from Shuttle fixed that issue but another problem remained - we could not get the on-board ALC650 codec to work. Using a sound card in the PCI slot fixed the problem but that obviously shouldn't be necessary.

We ran into a number of stability issues that could be attributed to the FS51; including a strange problem where a Word document became corrupt while it was open on the system. Shuttle has a new FS51 board on its way to us, insisting that the problem was isolated to our sample but we'd hope for better quality control on Shuttle's part.