Posted by Thomas
McGuire on April 5, 2001
Company: Abit Product:
SH6
Overclocking
Overclocking with the
Abit SH6 was fairly easy using Softmenu 3. The SH6 supports FSB
settings from 50 – 250 so it's fair to say everyone is catered
for. Simply enter in your desired FSB & you're away. You can also
select from several different FSB ratios to adjust your SDRAM &
PCI bus speeds as necessary, .e.g. Having SDRAM run at same speed as
FSB while PCI bus runs at 1/4 FSB speed & so on. NOTE – You
also have limited overclocking ability via the motherboards DIP
Switches (66, 100 & 133Mhz FSB's), although it's highly unlikely
you'll ever go near these at all.
Given my rather poor CPU
Heatsink however I only managed to get the CPU up to a 133Mhz FSB
successfully. That said with an initial FSB of 100Mhz that's not so
bad really is it. With my CPU now up to a rather nice 933Mhz I
re-benchmarked its performance. For the purposes of these tests the
FSB Rate (CPU:SDRAM:PCI) was set to 4:4:1.
Performance was
noticeably improved with the increase in FSB & memory speed too.
The stability was also just fine at this speed, although this could
be expected given that the AGP & PCI devices were all running at
the standard 33Mhz bus speed, while the PC 133 RAM was running at its
rated memory bus speed too. Those with better cooling systems in
place than I should have little problem overclocking with this
motherboard.
The SH6 also offers
Hardware monitoring & comes with a Thermal Header to further
assist you in your endeavours as well. For regular users you will
probably not even touch these features. Still they are a welcome
addition for any avid overclocker.
Pro's
Great stability.
Excellent overclocking
support via SoftMenu 3.
Supports the latest
advances in hardware, e.g. AGP 4 & ATA 100.
Performs well,
particularly with ATA 100 supporting Hard drives.
Hardware monitoring
support will be very welcome for overclockers, particularly with the
extra Thermal header to place wherever you need it most.
Good potential for
expandability.
Only Slot 1 I815E
motherboard available.
Con's
Rather pricey, although
it's not like there's an alternative Slot 1 I815E motherboard
available.
Large size may cause
problems for some.
Slot 1 CPU's (&
thus Slot 1 supporting motherboards) are coming to an end.
Conclusion
The Abit SH6 is a good
motherboard. It represents a fairly good upgrade path for those who
still have Slot 1 CPU's, but would rather avoid VIA based
motherboards (With their questionable AGP 4 implementation &
memory performance with earlier boards). It also has a great deal of
other features which make it attractive such as ATA 100 support,
hardware monitoring, a lot of expandability via USB & of course SoftMenu 3.
However, this
motherboard in a sense is a legacy product given that Intel CPU's are
returning to a Socketed form now. Other than that there is nothing
wrong with the Abit SH6 that can't be fixed with a BIOS update or 2.
You
purchase the Abit SH6 directly from Azzo.com.
