Socket 7 Board Review July 1998

Shuttle HOT-591P

Baby AT motherboard, VIA Apollo MVP3 Chipset, 512 kB L2 Cache, AT and ATX power supply, 3 PCI, 3 ISA, AGP Slot; 2 DIMM, 2 SIMM sockets. Voltages: 3.5 - 2.0V.

First the bad news: The little Shuttle board ist the slowest in our benchmarks. But it is also the only baby AT motherboard which came with the USB connector cable and a PS/2 cable as well. Besides it offers the possibility of clocking the main memory asynchonously and two SIMM sockets. That's not particularly much, but considering the board's size it's surprising that there was still room for them.

The three ISA slots can be equipped with full size cards, but it's impossible to use larger PCI cards (e.g. Voodoo² card, see picture). Shuttle provides only a very short installation guide containing all important settings. But it does not explain anything; that could become a serious problem for beginners. As most other boards, the 591P has to be configured by jumpers which gradually becomes nerve-wracking. This archaic way of setting up a motherboard is a deficit with others, too (also the winner of this review). I hope I will live long enough to experience motherboards which will be easy to set up...

In my eyes the board has too many performance deficits, even with the USB and PS/2 cable and 95 MHz bus speed support it cannot be recommended except for low end windows workstations. It runs perfectly stable, but the overall performance should be better - even for a low end product.