The Motherboard

The SiS651 Northbridge powers the SS51 SFF. Considering it's a tiny Flex ATX mainboard, everything you can possibly need is present. It's a Pentium 4, 478 pin based board, and will support the newer Northwood "B" CPUs. Obviously, you can still drop in an older 478 CPU, and depending on the model, jack it up to 133FSB for a nice overclock. The integrated video is there for those who want to use it, and can cache up to 64MB of ram. It's automatically disabled when you install an addon AGP card, which I suspect will be 99% of you.

There are two memory slots, supporting up to 2GB of ram. The chipset supports PC2700, which should complement the faster CPUs. Be aware that Shuttle officially lists only 6 brands verified to work, so be wary if you got some generic stuff. We ran Crucial PC2700 without any issues.

Being such a compact board, you're not going to find any onboard RAID, though you can easily install an addon card in the PCI slot for that. There are just two IDE connections, and one floppy connection. It should be noted that I had trouble with bootups when I set the hard drive jumpers to "Master". Devices should be set to "Cable Select" to avoid the problem, which is basically extremely long IDE drive detection times.

Although it's a SiS board, VIA supplies the VIA VT6306 responsible for the firewire chores. This is a boon for multimedia enthusiasts, as firewire is the de facto standard for video.

The Sis962L Southbridge is responsible for the lower level functions of the board. USB2.0 support is present, and with the explosion of USB2.0 devices on the market, I'm sure you'll have a use for it. Naturally, it is backwards compatible with USB1.1 devices, so peripherals such as keyboards and mice won't have any problems with it.

Realtek makes its presence here with a couple of its chips. Networking is supported by the Realtek RTL8139, with supports 10/100 Ethernet. I wouldn't stress too much about the lack of giga-ethernet support as your cable or DSL modem will be the bottleneck.

The second Realtek part is the ever popular Realtek ALC 650. We've covered this part in other motherboard reviews, and have always been quite pleased with it. It supports 5.1 sound, and unless you're a true audiophile, I'm sure it'll suit your needs perfectly.

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