Abit's SA6R - i815E With Highpoint ATA100 RAID Controller
The i815E board with an attitude and a 1GHz. Flip Chip to back it up

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
11/1/00

 
Test System specs are important to know, so that you can make a fair assessment on performance and our benchmark scores.  Here are the details of our test bed.

Hot Hardware's Test System The latest gear

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 1GHz. FCPGA at 933MHz. and 1Ghz..,  Abit SA6R Motherboard, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), Dual IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drives (thanks again Outside Loop), nVidia GeForce 2 GTS Ultra 64MB  AGP Graphics Card , Kenwood 72X CDROM, Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a, nVidia Detonator 3 Driver version 6.31

Why not jump right into the fun stuff here and show you what the SA6R can do for the over-clocking crowd.

Overclocking With The SA6R Our 1GHz. FCPGA really liked its new home

Abit's first attempt at an i815E board was pretty straight forward and not all that exciting when it came to over-clocking.  Sure, SoftMenu II was in there but the granularity of Front Side Bus speed selection was just "so-so" and it didn't allow us to explore the outer limits of our CPU.  The SA6R is a whole different animal however and really shined for us. 

The SA6R uses the same brand of PLL (phase lock loop) based Clock Generator from Realtek Semiconductor, that the Abit BX133 RAID uses.  The actual PLL that the SA6R uses is part number RTM5060-25 and is the one that cranks all the way up to 250MHz.  Herein lies one of Abit's secrets for delivering all those really spiffy clock frequencies to the Front Side Bus.  This chip provides super clean lower jitter (drift from the the base signal) clock timing in 1MHz. increments. 

We experienced EXCELLENT stability with the SA6R at all clock speeds and were able to take the 1GHz.  Coppermine CPU we used to new heights of over-clocking that we haven't hit with any other board to date.  This in and of itself should be considered a strong endorsement from Hot Hardware for this motherboard.  Here are the details.

Before today, we were only able to get the 1GHz. P3 to a clock speed of 1.088 GHz.  The SA6R allowed us to hit the 1.1G mark with a 147MHz. Front Side Bus speed.  We ran the processor at a rather high voltage of 1.95V but things were stable for hours of testing.  We didn't really "shake and bake" things too hard but regardless we completed our testing without a crash, so we're claiming success.  ;)  In short, the SA6R is designed with the "Over-Clockers" in mind and delivers on every level of that criteria.

Benchmarks With The SA6R Taking it up a notch

SiSoft's Sandra is always our quick sanity check...

Looking at the clock speed reported by Sandra here, we would have to say that the SA6R has very aggressive clock timing for the FSB.  When we set the FSB to 933MHz., Sandra reported 941MHz. and when set to 147MHz. X 7.5 for a total of 1102MHz., Sandra reports 1114MHz.  This should goose things up in the Application Benchmarks.  So, when set to a specific "stock retail" clock frequency, the SA6R still over-clocks your processor ever so slightly.  Since stability was excellent with this board, we view this a nothing but positive for the end user.

Memory scores were decent and when set to 147MHz. FSB, the i815E chipset has that much more headroom available in bandwidth.  Finally, the drive scores (taken on the Intel i815E controller) with an straight forward ATA100 interface, are very good.  With the High Point RAID Mode 0 setup, they are down right fantastic!  The Sandra scores favor the "bursty"  access and throughput of RAID 0 even more so than an some Ultra SCSI 160 setups we have tested here recently.  However, "sustained" bandwidth with Ultra SCSI 160 is still much higher.  On the other hand an Ultra160 setup will set you back a lot more than the 2 $100 ATA100 drives we used here and you don't need an additional adapter card with the SA6R since it is integrated on the motherboard.

That concludes the synthetic benchmarks.  Let's look at real application performance numbers. 

More Benchmarks and The Heat Meter Rating !