Abit SAR6 ( Intel 815 chipset) )
Written: Mar 08 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Rock solid, easy ovrclocking options, easy raid set up,6 pci slots,4x AGP.
Cons: limit to 512 mb of ram, 3 dimm slots, AMR slot.
The Bottom Line: The SAR6 offers 133 mhz FSB for the P3 crowd plus raid on a IDE budget with 6 PCI slots.
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| tophat3's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
I love Abit,
the SAR6 is like there BX133, except it uses the Intel 815 ( solano chipset ) for 133 Mhz FSB support and thus you are limited to 512Mb of memory max verse the 1.2 Gb of memory that the KX chipset gives you. It has a built in HiPoint370 Raid controller. Add to that support for AGP4x, ATA 100, 6 PCI slots, ( yes!! )and you have yourself one fine beast. Using the PPGA socket 370 I paired it up with an Intel 933 mhz chip and 2 Maxtor 7200 rpm ATA 100 30 Gb drives, plus 2 IBM GXP 7200 rpm ATA100 61.2 Gb drives set up in Raid 0 fashion. Add to this the Geoforce 2 64 Mb DDR, A fire wire card ( Siig ), an Hollywood Magic Mpeg Decoder, Sb Live Platinum and 512 Mb of PC 133 Ram and I got my self one fine non liner video editing system.
What really had me all smiles was the Raid set up. It was incredible easy. I did not partion the drives, the HiPoint's raid set up did all that for me. Once that was done I installed Windows 98se. Once installed I installed the HiPiont drivers (which are seen as a scsi raid card in device manager) I then installed the Intel chipset drivers. It was then up and running FAST. So fast that I then imported video. In 69k frames I only dropped 8 frames( and I am still trying to figure out why ) but for ther most part the raid works smooth and flawless grabbing video ( raw from the video camera via firewire port ) with no hiccups save for the occasinal dropped frame and I am aiming for no dropped frames.
The nice touch on the motherboard is the small fan on the 815 chipset. Also depsite the large tall capacitors around the CPU socket, you can still easily fit a Gold Orb fan cooler on the CPU and have clearance. One curios note, all the ATA 66 cable were defective ( they had a small hole in the ribbon cable around number 13 ribbon ) that came with the motherboard. I ended up buying new ones anyways. I use 2 single header 12 " ones for my Raid array and 2 double headers for the 2 - 30 Gb drives and the lone DVD Rom drive. With support for 8 IDE devices ( unless you have all the free IRQs this can be tough ) you can have a lot of mongo hardrives attached if you really want.
With the softmenu and tons of tweaking option you can really overclock to your hears content or adjust to your hearts content. PNP on the PCI bus was flawless as I loaded up the PCI slots and did my OS install, no problems no conflicts and everything worked right the first time no PCI slot swapping what so ever. APM works as advertised, better than my Tyan Tsunami 400, and I had to patch the bios to get a fix for that.
It's a pricy mother board and it's overkill if you are simply into hardcore gaming as you will not see much of an improvment in the raid set up, but if you are into non linear video editing than it's the way to go, only the T bird ( the Abit KT-7 Raid ) is better ( spped and memory wise ) but I have stability issues with the via chipset for video editing, thus I went to the 815.
-= tophat =-
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 287.00
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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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