RAIDers of the lost art
Written: Apr 10 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: IDE RAID, 4 IDE channels, Overclocking Options, easy setup
Cons: 815 chipset limit to 512mb max
The Bottom Line: RAID is easy to set up, overclocking features, jumperless set up, BIOS features o plenty, rock solid stability and fantastic perfomance.
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| tophat3's Full Review: Abit SA6R Motherboard |
My upgrade from my vaunted SCSI iNTEL P3 450mhz to a iNTEL P3 933mhz was a good one. I went from the BX chipset ( PC 100 dimms, you remember those don't you ? ) to the then screaming PC133 bus. Abit chose to pair the SA6R with the iNTEL 815 Solano chipset, as it run on a 133 mhz bus. The flipside is that the 815 maxed out at 512Mb of ram. So I set mine up with 2-256Mb sticks and maxed out the system. The other thing I was pining for in a motherboard was RAID, as my intent for this one was to have it used for video capture via a firewire port and thus RAID was a must as this motherboard does not support ATA 133, it does do ATA 100 however.
RAID set up for the HiPoint controller was snap, I set both my drives as master and on there own seperate channel. I use the HiPiont bios screen to set up the drives as one big one ( in my case 2 IBM 75GXP 76.2 Gb drives.. ). And later formatted under Windows 2000 ( once the driver for the controller was installed ). Windows will see the HiPoint as a SCSI device.
My other drives plus my opticals went on the remaining channels. One thing I was happy to see was IRQ sharing was easy. Last time I had 4 IDE channel ( a SIIG add on IDE controller ) IRQ sharing was an issue. This time around it was not and my SB Live card did not effect the IRQs one bit. What was more interesting is that I fully loaded out my system when I was building it, all my cards ( Vid, NIC, MPEG, SB Live ) and then fired it up. On the first time it booted up to my cd rom as I was booting to and fdisking and formatting the boot drive from there. The plethora of options ( on boot alone ) had me giddy with joy. 1st drive, 2nd drive ect.. from the opticals, from a scsi bus ect.... If you ever crashed a system but need another drive to boot to , this indeed makes a handy feature.
The BIOS had alot of features including alot of FSB tweaking and clock setting for you overclockers. But I run my system stock. So sorry no report from that avenue. The motherboard has a nice little led ( green ) to let you know you got power. Nice touch there. I can fit a Golden Orb Cooler for my 933 and it has no clearance problems with the tall capacitors that surround the socket 370. IDE connecters are laid out in an orderly fashion and it fits well in tower case. I do not know how cramped it might get in a Lan Li mid atx case like my Soyo P4 motherboard, as that one is indeed a bit of a squeeze. I have it paired with a 450 watt power supply ATX spec 2.01. Why so big ? I have 4 hardrives and 1 optical ( I sometimes have 2 ) and I do not like dropouts due to power fadeing.
Under Windows 2000 and 98SE it sets up fine, though in both cases you'll need the HiPoint driver installed to see the RAID or any additonal drive you might have hooked up to the HiPoint controller. It's ill advised to hook up a CD or DVD rom drive to HiPoint, but you can do it. All my Cables are of the 80 pin ULTRA DMA variety. Oddly enough the motherboard box has supplied cables , but 2 of them had tiny holes. This made for erratic booting errors and what not, so I quickly replaced them. Since everything is in the BIOS set up there are virtually no jumpers to set! I love this kind of motherboard.
Performance was as to be expected, seeing how I had all ATA 100 drives and my CD-R was on it own channel as master. Boot times were quick, and video captures from a 1394 fire wire card were flawless to the RAID array. I capture raw uncompressed AVI files to the 150 GB RAID0 ( no redundancy ,, yup I am a risk taker :) ). It uses NTFS so I can edit and re edit as the files and not woory about how big the files get ( especially with mpeg2 ). A good test run was 68,000 frames straight to the hard drives. I only dropped 2 frames. I think it due to the heat factor. IBM GXP series get hot, really hot. I have since put a massive 120 volt 5" fan blowning accross the IBMS. My Maxtors get slightly warm during intense disks transfer but they never get hot. As is the IBM 75 GXP series has a much deserved bad reputation due to a high rate of failures. So I am leery of these drives. I have allready lost my RAID0 array once on this rig, and not due to the controller ,but the failure of the IBM. I low level formatted and repartioned took care of that and now the drives run NTFS but seperated, once marked as IBM DAMAGED.. the other IBM GOOD.
You'll probally find this motherboard for a lower price than I found it since 933s are cheap, 133 memory is really cheap ( what with the advent of DDR ), so it's a good plunge if you want RAID, want to run a serious OS ( Windows 2000 ) and do not want to spend too much money but get alot of power. It will handle most of the games on the market with no problems ( I run mine with a GeoForce 2 Ultra 64 ). It's good for a non linear video editing station as well ( though if you do alot of transcoding, you'll want to go to a P4 2ghz+ and 333Mhz memory or Rambus * cough * )as time is a factor.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 160.00
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Epinions.com ID:
tophat3
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Location: Orange County, California - USA
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
SLI Equipped Fanatic
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