Fast, Stable, and Full of Features
Written: Nov 30 '00 (Updated Dec 18 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ultra Fast ATA 100 IDE, Supports high end Pentium III processors, runs perfectly stable at 133 MHz Bus, and has fairly nice integrated sound.
Cons: The integrated video and sound drive the price up a little
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| orion522's Full Review: Abit SE6 Motherboard |
I recently purchased this Abit SE6 motherboard to upgrade my aging AMD K6-2 500 system. Along with this motherboard I bought a Pentium III 800EB processor (800 MHz with a 133 MHz FSB). Here is what I think about the various aspects of this board:
Intel Chipset:
The SE6 comes with the Intel 815 (Solano) chipset, which is designed to run Flip Chip (FC-PGA) Celeron and Pentium III processors. What makes this chipset so great on this board is that it uses Ultra ATA-100 for connecting IDE devices. This significantly speeds up Hard Drive access and transfer, especially when the appropriate drivers are installed.
Windows 98SE requires you to install these drivers in order to get the best performance, but Windows ME will install these drivers automatically. You would probably want to enable DMA from the CD ROM and Hard Drive to get a little extra speed (this can be done using the Device Manager under the System control panel).
Integrated Video: **updated 12/18/00**
Ok, now I've had a chance to mess around with the board and have started using my integrated video for testing purposes. Let me say that the Intel OnBoard video is not that bad, but I still recommend getting an AGP card. It does suck up a little bit of CPU cycles because for one thing, it uses the processor more than regular AGP graphics cards. The quality you get out of the chip is actually very good for Direct3D games, however it isn't a high end GPU so you won't be able to play all of the latest and greatest gaming software out there.
Also, when you first boot up using the integrated video, you'll notice that right away, the chip takes 1MB of system memory to use as it's own. When you boot into windows or use another utility to test how much video memory you have, you may notice different numbers ranging from about 2 to 4 MB. I read at Intel's website that the video card will automatically allocate up to 11MB of system memory dynamically as it sees fit. This is all well and good, but I like all the system memory I can get and would rather have the video card use it's own memory. So if you do plan on using the integrated video, maybe you'll want to pop another DIMM in your system to make up for the lost memory.
Integrated Sound:
The integrated Avance AC'97 audio CODEC (compressor/decompressor, it's just the built in sound chip) isn't all that bad. I had a Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold before this, but since this board doesn't have any ISA slots (which is kind of a bad thing, but ISA is dying anyway) and the sound quality between the two is very competitive. The AC'97 seems to require amplified speakers, which means you should have speakers that have their own power supply and volume control. The one thing I see that is a downfall of this chipset is that it doesn't seem to have sound blaster compatibility for older DOS games (please email me if you can get the SET BLASTER autoexec command to actually work with MS DOS games).
Those, I think, are basically the most important aspects of the board. There are of course many other features that this board has. Go to this page to see the rest of the stuff that this motherboard offers:
http://www.abit.nl/english/product/motherboards/se6.htm
In conclusion, I definitely like this board and recommend this to anyone who wants to build themselves a system that is fast, stable, and upgradeable. Installation was super easy, especially with Windows ME. After installing Windows ME, there were no drivers I had to install for the motherboard, I only had to install drivers for other cards I put in the system.
The price of the board may be inflated slightly but that is because of the integrated video and audio, however the cost is still below other manufacturers like Asus and Intel. Comparably, the SE6 is still inexpensive. So if you're looking for a stable motherboard that is incredibly fast, go with this one and you won't regret it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
orion522
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Member: Larry
Location: California
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 6 members
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