Good solid board..
Written: Jan 05 '01 (Updated Jan 07 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Solid construction, fast IDE interface, stable overclocker
Cons: Limited bus speed choices, bad DIMM slot placement
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| Adisharr's Full Review: Abit SE6 Motherboard |
I recently built three Pentium III systems based on this motherboard. I chose this board because of the new 815 chipset which gives you on-board video (not used), sound (included but not on 815 chipset and not used), 1/2 AGP multiplier (used) and ATA100 drive interface (used).
** PHYSICAL INSPECTION / INSTALLATION **
The board installed normally. Examining the mounting holes revealed ample space for the tops of the mounting screws to contact the board with no danger of shorting against any of the circuit traces. There doesn't seem to be any need for using isolated standoff's either with the bottom of the board providing just as much mounting area.
Being an ATX form factor, the attached ports are all in the proper places as expected. There are NO ISA slots provided so if you have any older cards that require one, you will be out of luck. That being said, ISA slots aren't really needed much anymore if your building a new PC.
The area around the processor socket provides enough room for most heatsinks. I have been using Golden Orb heatsink/fan units which are on the smaller side but I have read where others using much larger heatsinks had no trouble mounting them. On some other boards, sometimes capacitors are mounted too close to the socket causing problems mounting some heatsinks - something to consider. There is also a fan header close to the socket.
The ATX power connector is mounted in an open area which made it easy to attach the power supply cable. The floppy port is in a typical location as are the two IDE channel ports. They are at the edge of the board which made it a bit tough to attach the cables to but also made them closer to the IDE devices which is a plus. In the midtower case I was using I only needed about 5 inches of cable to attach the hard drive.
The three DIMM memory slots are too close to the AGP bus slot which often causes the left side latches to be blocked by the AGP graphics card if your using one (which I hope you are :) ) This isn't a problem if you put your memory in before your graphics card but if you do it in reverse, you won't be able to install your memory w/o first removing the AGP card.
** POWERING UP THE BOARD **
The board powered up normally and detected all the external PCI devices as well as my IBM 75GXP hard drive, SONY CD-RW drive and floppy drive. The SOFTMENU II BIOS options are quite extensive and offer quite a bit of tweaking options.This board is designed for overclocking in mind and offers options to adjust the processor voltage, bus speeds and a number of other things. For more detailed info. you can go to the ABIT website and download the complete .PDF document.
** BENCHMARKS **
I proceeded to format the hard drive and install Windows 98 SE. Everything went smooth. After the installation I installed HDTach to benchmark the ATA100 drive interface to see how fast is really is. I ran it and it came back with an average transfer rate of approximately 7-8MB/sec which is terrible for this drive. I was unimpressed until I realized that I forgot to install the driver for the interface.. DOH!
After installed the .INF files (do this FIRST before installing anything else) and then the ATA100 chipset driver, I re-ran the benchmark and this time the average transfer rate was about 35MB/sec - MUCH much better. Transfer rates were solid across the hard drives platter and cache transfers were off the graph. CPU usage was about 23% which is comparable to my dedicated Promise ATA66 card (4-5%)
The Radeon 32 DDR and Soundblaster Live! MP3 cards installed without a hitch using the latest drivers for both.
The processor was a Pentium III 700E which runs at a 100MHz system bus using a 7.0 multiplier. I was easily able to overclock the processor to 933MHz (default voltage) and ran a number of benchmarks on it (3D Mark 2000, Norton system, etc..) It ran perfectly stable for an 8 hour period with no problems at all. The 3D Mark 2000 score came in at about 4700 with the default settings. The bus speeds are NOT changeable in 1 MHz increments like some other boards but there are enough choices for most overclocking applications. Look for the Abit SH6 to include SOFTMENU III which has 1 MHz bus speed tweaking resolution.
All in all, I built this machine primarily for CD burning, gaming and surfing and it handled all the following software fine. It also benchmarks EXTREMELY close to my coveted Abit BE6-II revision one board.
HALF-LIFE
SERIOUS SAM BETA
3D MARK 2O00
WORD / EXCEL / PUBLISHER 2000
HD TACH
BALDORS GATE II
STARCRAFT
QUAKE III
NERO 5 FULL VERSION
CDEX (MP3 ENCODER)
TPMGENC (MPEG ENCODER)
GAME SPY
ADAPTEC EASY CD
PAINTSHOP PRO
STAR OFFICE 5.2
I did have problems running RealMYST 1.1 which I can't seem to solve with driver updates and available patches but considering I can run just about everything else I contribute that more to insufficient testing on the part of the publisher than anything hardware related.
If you have any addition questions, you can e-mail me and I'll do my best to respond.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Adisharr
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Location: Rochester, NY
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
I rate things like I see them.. No bias here..
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