Posted by Thomas
McGuire on April 5, 2001
Company: Abit Product:
SH6
Test System
For the testing of this motherboard the following system was used.
All the latest drivers/BIOS updates were installed as appropriate.
General experiences/Other notes
In this section I'll mention my general experiences with this motherboard & other note worthy things before moving onto Benchmarks & more.
As I mentioned earlier with the large size of the Abit SH6 &
potential for a new revision with on-board RAID support, the SH6 also offers other expansion
possiblities. In addition to the 2 USB ports, the board comes with an additional USB expansion cable with an extra 2 USB ports. The board also comes with an additional COM Port cable, should you need to add an extra COM Port to your system.
The Onboard Graphics card remained unused by myself, although if you aren't interested in purchasing an AGP/PCI Graphics Card this should suffice your basic needs, this also is upgradeable via an AGP InLine Memory module, which can improve performance, or an additional upgrade is also available to
enable TV Out/Flat Panel support.
Upon installing the latest Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver for Windows 2000 my IDE devices became detected as SCSI devices (Although performance was improved with the Hard drive over the Microsoft IDE drivers), as you can see below.
More than likely however this is a driver bug as I experienced a similar issue with the Asus P3V4X upon installing the VIA IDE drivers. This bug should only really be of concern to those who wish to use an IDE CD Writer. Although, in that case you can simply uninstall the Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver & use the standard Microsoft drivers instead.
Performance with this motherboard was great in Windows (In particular Hard drive performance was noticeably better) & stability was also another, very welcome, strong point. Although to be fair I never really have has too many problems with stability on most of the other motherboards I've used.
