ABIT SH6 Slot-1 i815E ATX

ABIT Plans for the Future

In the beginning of the review we stated that the SH6 has quite a large sized PCB. One of the reasons we proposed was that ABIT need more room for the routing since now a CPU slot is used instead of a socket. However, if you look closely at the board, you will see that ABIT is actually planning for the future.

For starters, if you look at the bottom left hand corner of the 82801BA ICH2, you will see a square silkscreen. Then if you look at the two IDE connectors below the DIMM slots, you will also notice space for two extra IDE connectors. From these it is pretty obvious that ABIT has prepared for the possibilities of an RAID controller on another revision of the SH6. And from our experience with ABIT's motherboards, the RAID controller will most likely be the Highpoint 370 IDE RAID controller, which features Ultra ATA 100 support. The RAID functions included are RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1.

Further, if you look at the top left hand corner, on top of the fifth and the sixth PCI slots, there is also a silkscreen and spaces for two little connectors. From our experience, the size of the connector appears to be for IEEE 1394 Firewire connectors. As we have seen the Firewire setup more and more common in recent motherboards, it is not too surprising for that to appear on the later revision of the SH6.

From our Motherboards in 2001 Preview, we have covered that the ABIT SA6R-1394 has a single chip Firewire solution. In the past, Firewire has generally been implemented with a two chip solution, which takes up more PCB space and increases the cost by a fair amount - something motherboard manufacturers have pointed to as limiting the adoption of integrated Firewire. We were not able to confirm if ABIT has come up with the one-chip solution, but from what we see on the SH6, it is very likely that ABIT has found a cheap solution for their Firewire implementation.

Therefore ABIT has their reasons in using a larger size of PCB - to reduce the time and cost for future revisions of the motherboard. If you recall, ABIT had a total of ten 440BX motherboards. Since we know that the i815E chipset will be around for quite a while, it makes sense for ABIT to design a board where they can add in or take out some components to produce another revision.

Now if we look back on all the i815E solutions ABIT has come up with so far, the SE6 has its unique design. Starting with the SA6R, it already has the space for the RAID controller as well as the Firewire, so the upcoming SA6R-1394 will follow the same reference board. If we compare the SA6R and the SH6, we see that the two boards are very similar as well. The only difference in the design of these two boards is in the CPU section of the board where there is either a Socket-370 interface or Slot-1 interface, resepectively

Therefore, now ABIT can base on the need of the market and decide what they are going to do tomorrow. If a lot of people ask for the i815E Slot-1 solution, ABIT can release the RAID or Firewire version of the board easily. What ABIT saved was the money and time in designing a new board with a new feature. Besides just releasing a new revision of the board earlier, those boards will probably have more attractive pricing thanks to the shared PCB design.