Posted by Thomas
McGuire on April 5, 2001
Company: Abit Product:
SH6
Here's a shot of what the board itself
looks like, along with all the connectors & other such
things labelled.
Manual, Software & Installation
NOTE - As regular visitors to 3D
Spotlight may recall this is my second SH6, the first one I
received while in America, which seemingly got broken during
my flight home. Thanks to Azzo.com
of course for sending me the replacement board.
The Manual is fairly good & explains
all the relevant BIOS settings & features very well
indeed, including installation of the included software in
multiple Operating Systems. The Software CD comes with an
online manual along with drivers for all the hardware &
other utilities. It's interesting to see that Abit hasn't
included Gentus Linux though, which came bundled with the
Abit VT6X4. Looks like Abit has abandoned its Linux
distribution.
While the Abit SH6 installed pretty much
fine in the case I used in America, the case used in Ireland
was another matter altogether. The SH6 is a rather large
motherboard (More on this later) & I actually had to saw
off part of the 5 ¼ inch drive bay trays in order for it to
fit in correctly to my case. A minor modification no doubt,
although my CD\DVD drives now stick out a bit as a result of
this.
On closer inspection of the board itself
I noticed there were IDE 3 & IDE 4 connectors visible
(Beside the actual IDE 1 & 2 channels). In the future it
seems likely like Abit may release a new revision of this
board with a RAID controller onboard as a result. Conversely
this may not happen, more than likely it will depend on how
popular the dying Slot 1 CPU's remain (Given that Intel have
changed back to a Socketed interface once more now).
Other than the potential size issue -
installation of the Abit SH6 was your general
walk-in-the-park situation with no disasters or other
complications occurring. All hardware, without exception,
was detected & installed correctly. I also performed a
clean installation of Windows 2000, again, this all went
smoothly with all devices being detected correctly.
