VOGONS


First post, by byte_76

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I’ve just come into possession of a Shuttle HOT-591P revision 2.0 board.

The south bridge has some damage with pins 72 - 75 completely missing. (IRQ3 - IRQ6)
Initially the IDE ports were not working and I had to repair traces for pins 69 and 70 which restored functionality to the IDE ports.
I’m not sure how the missing pins will affect operation of the board but it boots and seems to work fine in Windows 98, so I currently have no intention of trying to repair the damage any more than I already have.

Unfortunately this board has a poorly designed layout as the positioning of the CPU socket prevents the use of long PCI cards and also gets in the way of cards in the AGP slot.
I was already a little annoyed that I could not install my Diamond Viper V770 Ultra because the CPU heatsink was in the way.

Aside from the layout though, it seems like a fairly decent board in terms of quality.

What are your experiences with this board? Anything positive to say about it?

Can this board compete with some of the top AT SS7 boards?

What can I do to optimize the board for reliability and performance? (Physical mods and BIOS mods?)

Last edited by byte_76 on 2025-06-10, 12:29. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 9, by waterbeesje

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This board should have all the potential: AGP, the right chipset and support for all multiplier and fsb settings. Definitely worth saving if you ask me!

The poor layout with the CPU socket reminds me of the P5A-B: with anu half decent sink attached the graphics card will have a near miss/touch experience. I even sticked some insulation tape onto the sink to prevent the tnt2 from touching the bare metal.
Not a v770 btw but indeed also tnt2 non-m64 😀

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 2 of 9, by byte_76

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The board is working so I consider it saved already, as I’ve painstakingly repaired the two traces for the pins of the south bridge that are required for the IDE ports to work and I haven’t yet identified any further loss of functionality resulting from the missing pins.

The board seems to work fine now.

Reply 3 of 9, by nickles rust

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The K6 "plus" mobile CPUs can be very low power. If you adjust the voltage lower, these can work well with passive heatsinks. So with some customization you could use a short heatsink to clear expansion cards. I did this with a PC Chips M530.

Reply 4 of 9, by Nexxen

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You can safely scrape 5mm of plastic from the brim. It'll expose the copper connections and you'll be able to solder enameled wires (or just wires) to the connections to pads.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I1OH7z_VEo8
and, why not this guy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMMsLJfUuU

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoDY62rQsQU

It's nothing difficult, be careful to be fresh and full of energy and do it slowly.
No rush and it'll be 100% recovered.

I'll post some youtube videos to help you visualize the chore.

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

"One hates the specialty unobtainium parts, the other laughs in greed listing them under a ridiculous price" - kotel studios

Reply 6 of 9, by dionb

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Not having IRQ3-6 is not great - particularly if you're running DOS. Still lucky the damage hit something not completely critical.

As for the board, it's a low-end design aimed mainly at small size and low cost, hence the compromises in layout. But as waterbeesje says, otherwise it's a full 'super' socket 7 with BIOS (and voltage regulator) supporting K6plus. Given lack of IRQs this would be a good late Win95 system. No fancy clocking though - the PLL doesn't go over 100MHz.

Reply 7 of 9, by byte_76

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weedeewee wrote on 2025-06-10, 17:42:

no IRQ 3-6 means, no serial ports (3&4), and no floppy drive (6)

I think I can live with that for the time being.

At this stage, I don't have the right tools and I'm not confident enough in my skills to fix the missing pins. It certainly isn't easy because the size of the pins are tiny and my eyesight isn't as good as it once was. Oh and of course a steady hand is needed, which again is a struggle because I always find my hand shaking when I'm trying to solder such tiny components.
If I were to give it a shot, I think that I would at least need an engraving tool (Which I don't have) to grind away the plastic and expose the pins. I wouldn't want to try to do that with a knife or something that requires manual scraping.

I've confirmed that the floppy drive is indeed not working but I don't really need it, as there are ways to work around that. I also don't need the serial ports because I'm using a PCI USB card for mouse support and don't have any other serial devices, however it would be nice to use PS/2. Does that require the missing IRQ's?

I am happy to use the board with Windows 98. Most of the games that I want to play with such a system do work in Win98.
For DOS, I have 486 and P1 machines.

As for mods and performance tuning of the 591P, any recommendations?

Reply 8 of 9, by weedeewee

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byte_76 wrote on 2025-06-10, 18:39:
I think I can live with that for the time being. ... I've confirmed that the floppy drive is indeed not working but I don't real […]
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weedeewee wrote on 2025-06-10, 17:42:

no IRQ 3-6 means, no serial ports (3&4), and no floppy drive (6)

I think I can live with that for the time being.
...
I've confirmed that the floppy drive is indeed not working but I don't really need it, as there are ways to work around that. I also don't need the serial ports because I'm using a PCI USB card for mouse support and don't have any other serial devices, however it would be nice to use PS/2. Does that require the missing IRQ's?

PS2 keyboard uses IRQ1, PS2 mouse, IRQ12, so no, neither of those require those missing IRQs. an ISA soundcard or parallel port device might find a use for IRQ5, but then again, you still have IRQ7.
Though using both an ISA soundcard & parallel port device might give you some hassle.

enjoy.

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https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Serial_port

Reply 9 of 9, by keropi

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It is a great board - been using a rev3.1 since 2001 or so... Mainly use it for DOS so the layout does not affect me but it is indeed an issue. For a mmx dos system it is great , you should upgrade to the latest bios for memory bank interleaving and 128gb HDD support, the files are available on vogonsdrivers .
Turning off ACPI also frees up irq2 for some good old mpu fun 😀

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