New Socket 7 Motherboards - July 1997

Shuttle HOT-603

The HOT-603 is using the AMD640 chipset (equal to the VIA Apollo VP2) and has been designed after AMD's guidelines for a good K6 board. The bootup message of the BIOS and the AMD logo on the right where the EPA one usually resides remind you of this each time you are starting the computer. This board also comes with 1 MB of level 2 cache, which is mainly responsible for its second place under Windows NT. The revision of the test board was pre-release so it might be that this board will be tweaked up a little bit more to reach the performance of the FIC PA-2007. The board comes in Baby AT form factor and has three instead of only two DIMM slots. As all the VIA chipset using boards it has a much larger cacheable area than the TX chipset boards. Switching voltage regulator.

This board is the other reason why this update goes online so late. I tried everything but I couldn't get 75 MHz bus speed to work at all!! Instead of this I came a cross the strangest occurance!! When I jumpered the board to 75 MHz bus speed, it depended on the type and amount of RAM I used if it would boot at 75 or only 66 MHz bus speed!! Two SDRAM DIMMs and the board would just ignore my 75 MHz setting and run with 66 MHz. If it once ran at 75 it didn't get far though ... it always crashed at OS load.

I have to let this board off though, since it's only a pre-release version which will most certainly not be released with those strange problems. Anyway, there was no way of getting 6x86MX PR233 results with it for now.

AMD640 chipset and four L2 cache chips - the easiest way to recognise the HOT-603. In the background you can see the three DIMM slots.