Great starter board
Written: Jul 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ultra stability, reliable, long lasting, supports P3
Cons: 100Mhz FSB, Only supports 384mb ram, Ultra33 IDE interface
The Bottom Line: Excellent pricing with long lifetime, reliability makes this board an excellent choice for entry-level/mid-range work.
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| FekIhr's Full Review: Supermicro P6SBA |
The P6SBA has been out for a while, but it is still one of the best boards out there for your Intel CPU.
Instead of rattling off the many features, let's go through what I found to be nice about it - you can read up on the features elsewhere :)
3 DIMM sockets made use of cheap memory chips ... but, as most of us know .. that's no longer a problem.
2X AGP Port - Don't need to settle for substandard graphics with a low cost motherboard
The Ultra33 IDE built-in card could be better ... but hey, IDE is no good - if you want to go complaining about speed, get a SCSI card (like I did ~ IDE won't help you much at all. I noticed little difference when upgrading from a 5200 RPM drive to a faster 7200 drive - Nor when I upgraded to Ultra66 - And not much with Ultra100. IDE is a limited technology - An old UltraSCSI card with 20mb/s transfer rates is just as fast as Ultra66 IDE .. actually, even faster. And it takes up less CPU to use.)
4 PCI slots - make nice room for a nice complement of upgrades, if you have the AGP video slot taken - you can add a few good cards. The board also has 2 unshared ISA slots (and 1 shared) so you can put an old "real" modem in your system instead of the wintrash PCI garbage.
PC Health monitors : Keep an eye on your CPU & system so you can make sure it's running in optimal conditions. Ever wonder how your cooling system is performing? Here's your answer. The board montors CPU temp, case temp, fans, etc. It can be configured to halt the system on failure of fans, etc.
Jumperless configuration : No worry about configuration problems, the board does it all itself.
Nice lifetime & reliability - here's where I am impressed. I beat this board up pretty nasty. I run a business that requires 100% uptime. The system with this board has been running literally 24/7 from the day I bought it ... to today. No crashes, no failures, completely reliable from day one to now. In fact, I'm so impressed with this board that rather than replacing it, I will be buying a new P3 CPU to replace the P2-350 that it currently has. This board makes for a perfect network workstation (Internet apps, e-mail, etc) , nice graphics editing station for Photoshop, and is great with Windows 2000/NT. It's also good with Windows 95/98 from what I know - I did run the OS for some time .. but, even the best of the best (Supermicro) will have its share of problems with the worst OSes around (Windows 9x, ME). I'm a stability junkie - so NT is my choice of Windows - and this board is great with it.
In comparison to lower quality boards:
There is a noticible difference when running a lower quality board. This board is friendlier with configuration, as well as driver support. It's a true hassle-free job to implement this board. Only the best quality components are placed into Supermicro products - so there will definitely be support.
This board is an all-around great board. It is definitely something to consider when putting together a computer. It is great for business applications (Not requiring extreme power - i.e. Network application terminals, basic Internet terminals, P.O.S. machines, Printservers), as well as basic home applications (Word processing, internet, games). It's defintely not the choice of the power user ... but, I would say that the power user might get it for everyone else to use ... to keep the power system free for their own enjoyment
;-)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 120.00
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Epinions.com ID:
FekIhr
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Location: New Britain, CT
Reviews written: 37
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Run of the mill IT professional. Nothing to see here (I guess.... )
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