BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-12, 02:42:

Oh, I wonder if it's that "Book PC" formfactor that never seemed to take off in the west.

No, that's just Shuttle's "XPC" Mini-PC proprietary design. They released 10s of these XPC models over a span of 15 years at least, all built around the same design and cooling concept.
And they were pretty awesome and efficient, got a couple of them over the years 😀

That's this specific motherboard in its natural habitat:

By coincidence, last week I brought home a free Shuttle XPc SK21G. Has a Athlon 64 3400+, 1Gb of DDR ram, and a GeForce 6200 128Mb AGP video card. Motherboard caps look good. POSTs fine; haven't had time to do much more with it.

MNrocketry wrote on 2026-01-12, 14:39:

By coincidence, last week I brought home a free Shuttle XPc SK21G. Has a Athlon 64 3400+, 1Gb of DDR ram, and a GeForce 6200 128Mb AGP video card. Motherboard caps look good. POSTs fine; haven't had time to do much more with it.

The caps are starting to bulge just look at the one directly beside the chipset heatsink.

Sifting through a pile of old school computers I found this reasonably tidy IBM Aptiva 2196 equipped with an AMD K6-2 550.

Working without issue so far.

In the same pile I also found this very random Radeon HD 2600 Pro AGP, also functional.

Cool, I was just looking through some chipset lists and thought. "Hey, you don't see SiS 540 very often" and there one is. Be interesting to see what numbers it makes if configured close to whatever intel chipset benchmarks you can do a close config to.

TheIpex wrote on Today, 03:08:

Sifting through a pile of old school computers I found this reasonably tidy IBM Aptiva 2196 equipped with an AMD K6-2 550. […]
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Sifting through a pile of old school computers I found this reasonably tidy IBM Aptiva 2196 equipped with an AMD K6-2 550.

Working without issue so far.

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In the same pile I also found this very random Radeon HD 2600 Pro AGP, also functional.

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Wow, that's a nice find! Such a cool looking case.

SiS540 isn't a real common chipset and the integrated SiS300 graphics is really not bad at all. As far as integrated graphics are concerned, it is surprisingly balanced for running alongside a K6-2, in my opinion.

Also, here is the motherboard: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/univer … -scient-pro-283

Looks like it has a Crystal CS4299 sound chip (AC'97), so not ideal for retro gaming, but I think it'll do okay if you just stick to running games in Windows 9x (maybe ME?). Otherwise, could make for an interesting project to find the best low profile PCI sound card that could possibly fit. There definitely aren't many, and finding low profile brackets for them would be an even bigger challenge, but... yeah, if I had this system that is what I would do... for some reason. 😆

Also, I'm pretty sure the 550AGR is somewhat rare. I have never seen one personally.

BitWrangler wrote on Today, 03:54:

Cool, I was just looking through some chipset lists and thought. "Hey, you don't see SiS 540 very often" and there one is. Be interesting to see what numbers it makes if configured close to whatever intel chipset benchmarks you can do a close config to.

This is actually my first encounter with the AMD K6 CPUs in general. I was planning on acquiring one for an Epox SS7 board I have in storage but never got around to it.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 03:55:

Wow, that's a nice find! Such a cool looking case.

I do like the blue.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 03:55:

Looks like it has a Crystal CS4299 sound chip (AC'97), so not ideal for retro gaming, but I think it'll do okay if you just stick to running games in Windows 9x (maybe ME?). Otherwise, could make for an interesting project to find the best low profile PCI sound card that could possibly fit. There definitely aren't many, and finding low profile brackets for them would be an even bigger challenge, but... yeah, if I had this system that is what I would do... for some reason. 😆

Thanks for looking into it. I don't really have any plans beyond running a few games/benchmarks. The only low-profile sound card I have is the SB0570 Audigy SE (Another dumpster find) which I don't believe is desirable (or even possible?) to use on Win9x.