Sticking with Basics
Written: Sep 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stability, Even non-believers of Supermicro have to appreciate this board.
Cons: Only supports ATA/33, 100Mhz Memory and 100Mhz bus speeds.
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| soveryfun's Full Review: Supermicro P6SBA |
I've been a follower of supermicro products. Like most motherboard companies there are hits and misses. Supermicro has always put an extra effort into making the current I/O and chipset products work stable. Whenever the industry comes along and makes a good chipset this is your best chance at getting a stable motherboard from most manufacturers. It's what a board manufacturer does with it that's important. This motherboard from Super is absolutely wonderful. It's extremely stable and accepts multiple configurations. The misconception people have is they buy either buy a good motherboard and less expensive components or they buy a less expensive motherboard and more expensive components. The reality is the motherboard is the foundation of a computer and it starts from there. Where you build up from that will determine the stability of the rest of your system. I've been using this board since it's release. And it's given me no problems what so ever. I'm still using it today. With Intel’s release of the i820 and the problems with the MTH chip used with it for SDRAM people have been looking down other avenues for chipsets. Although Super makes very decent i820 chipset boards the P6SBA and other flavors of the BX chipset are still holding strong. The only things you do not get with this set up is the 133Mhz bus speeds, support for the PC133memory and the ATA/66 IDE. Since the most improvement to this system is use of the ATA/66 drives you can simply add a host card like Promise Technologies ATA/66; ATA/100 both in standard and RAID forms. I use this set up in rock solid workstations or in very light to medium server applications. I recommend use of this board to anyone building a system that wants to be certain of flawless operation. Some of the specs on the board are:
Single Pentium III/II 233~700Mhz (100mhz bus)
AGP 2X (for you gamers out there you may be interested in at least 4X)
4 PCI
3 ISA
UDMA/33
Wake-on-LAN
Multiple board sensors for constant system health monitoring
ACPI/PC 98 Features
100MHz SDRAM up to 768 MB EDO or 384 MB unbuffered SDRAM on
3 168-pin DIMM's
All I/O functions (floppy, serial, USB, PS/2, Parallel, and infrared.)
Plus with all Super boards you'll receive all utilities.
Until Intel's or other variants come out with something extremely stable this is a real great board. Or if you have a system like Hewlett Packards Pavillions this is a great drop in Fix. You'll only need this board, a video card, and a sound board. Optional modem if you want full functionality.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 68.00
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Epinions.com ID:
soveryfun
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Location: Evans, CO
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 2 members
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