Abit SL6 Motherboard

Written by Benjamin "Benji" Korousic
Published 28 December 2000

I opened my snailmailbox and there it finally was. My first Intel 815i Solano chipset motherboard with intregrated video/audio and only PCI/AGP. I ran inside, threw my shoes off and opened up the package. It was a nice shiny package that had the mb's name printed on and on the side I could see that Abit have had several winners on the marked. They had recived several awards from Toms Hardware, Anand Tech, Sharky Extreme, PcWorld and many more of all the hardcores. That made me feel that this was a great product including the review's I already had read on it.

Installation

I've opened the box, containing the five usuals: An ATA66 cable, a floppy cable, the excellent Abit manual, a cd with drivers/utilities, and of cource the shiny motherboard in it's brownish yellow color.
Then the fun started. I got myself a screwdriver and an Addtronics 7896A to place the mb in. The installation of the motherboard went painless. You may wonder why I wrote that, it's primarly because of the 4-5 different motherboards I've tried the last months. Not all of them were as easy to install, and one them was crap. My new PC was now only missing a CPU and some memory... I threw in my PIII 800E and 128mb Viking PC133 RAM. Everything hooked up and ready. 25sec later I was running Win98.

I had to install a Intel INF package and the special Intel ATA drivers and the audio/video drivers. The installation went easy and with no problems. After a another restart everything worked as it should. Always sceptical, I wanted to test the onboard audio and video, because they normally suck bigtime. so I downloaded 3D Mark 2000, the results were so extremly bad that ain't worth posting them. The soundpart wasn't much better either, sounding like a cheap version of my first SB 16 clonecard. So, I have to say the onboard video/audio is pretty unusable for anyone concerning about the visual/audio even a little bit. But as a low-budget alternate for companies/schools wanting to cut the cost, or people spending most of their time surfing, it may be attractive. Sure as hell I threw in my Geforce 2 GTS and SB Live 5.1!

The installation of those went painless, as before, using the standard Sound Blaster drivers that come with the CD, and Detonator 7.17. After running 3D Mark 2000, I've got 6000 points! That's 1200 points more than with the same setup on my last motherboard based on VIA133 chipset. Not only the 1200 in difference suprised me but also the new benchmarks I got in SiSoft Sandra 2001. I couldn't compare them to the last ones. It was either Intel's 815i chipset or Abit who made it skyrocket.
Stable as a rock at default speed too... even with Win98 did I say default? Let's change that...

Overclocking

After hours of massive Q3A fraggin I wanted even more speed. So I decided to check it's OC capabilities.
The orginal Intel cooling solution wouldn't get me very far, but it wouldn't hurt to try. At default speed, the temparature was 38 degrees celsius after several hours of Q3A, wich is great for the OEM-bastard. The SL6 offer multiplier setting by eighter jumpers or in BIOS I choose BIOS since it made all much easier.

Setup

PIII 800 (8*100), Geforce 2 GTS, 128mb PC133, boxed fan

Summary

It's a great motherboard for most people. It has onboard audio/video for the low-budget systems. However, we won't count this in, as we regard it as useless and not a factor of purchase in 99% of cases. The drivers/utilities CD is well figured out and easy to install. The OC part was great as far as you get with this cooling setup... The Abit SL6's stability, speed and power (as on the box) makes it worth every penny I've payed for it.

Discuss this in our forums!