Shuttle HOT-591P Baby AT Motherboard
Review
Last updated: 3/27/00
CPU SUPPORT. There are jumper
setting for just about any Socket 7 CPU. An installation note, which
comes with the motherboard, has jumper setting for 450 Mhz AMD K6-2 and K6-3
processors. Shuttle's
Web site specs it for 450 Mhz K6-2's and 500 Mhz K6-3's.
MEMORY. There are two 168-pin
DIMM and two 72-pin SIMM memory slots. They are coupled to the CPU
by the Northbridge with one Elite MT 512K, 5 ns high performance cache' chip. The
three memory slots can accommodate up to 128 Mbytes of PC-100 or 66 Mhz memory;
but, the MVP3 chipset with 512 KByte of cache' will only cache' 128
MBytes of it. 128 Mbytes is, therefore, the practical memory limit. Unfortunately,
experience shows that DIMMs and SIMMs cannot be mixed on this board.
JUMPERS. This is not
the easiest motherboard to jumper, but I have certainly seen worse. It
comes jumpered with the CPU core voltage set for auto-detect and that shouldn't
have to be changed. Clock and multiplier jumpers are a mesh-mash of
settings which are hard to remember and must be carefully set. All
of the settings, up to the 400 Mhz K6-3, are printed on the board. I
could probably meander my way through setting them for any of the supported
CPU's without the motherboard book. The board should ship with
more spare jumpers.
CAPACITORS. I counted 42 electrolytic
capacitors, an ample number. The ones I inspected carefully were rated
at a respectable 105°C. There are quite few bypass, etc. capacitors all over
the board, but I have seen motherboards with quite a few more. There is a
fair measure of them in the middle of the CPU socket. I saw no teardrop
tantalums.
I/O CABLES. The 591P
comes with the typical Baby At cable set. There is no PS/2 mouse I/O
cable, although there is a PS/2 header and jumper on the motherboard. And
there is no USB cable, an omission which is now just about inexcusable; however,
most Baby AT boards still ship this way. Perhaps, the manufacturers
have as much trouble as I do in finding them... (The USB cable
and bracket set I currently sell fits this board.)
HARDWARE MONITORING. The
591P has no built-in hardware monitoring function. There is, however,
a header on the board to connect a EISCA (Enhanced Intelligent System Cooler Architecture) "cooler." This
is a special CPU cooling fan with a hardware monitoring capability built-in
to the heatsink. An EISCA cooler connects to the motherboard with 12-pin
ribbon. They are available from manufactures such as AAVID. If
non-EISCA CPU fan is installed on this motherboard and it fails, you can
probably kiss-off the CPU! I would not, therefore, install an expensive
K6-3 on this motherboard without an EISCA-equipped cooling fan. Regardless
of the technical advantages and EISCA may have, I would have preferred a
more practical design; i.e., a built-in monitoring function consisting of
a monitoring chip and a couple of thermisters.
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