Has anyone already been running Abit SE6 815e (or SL6 815)? If so, how is it?

[fxsts]

I just got Abit SE6 (Intel 815e) delivered to me from www.Allstarshop.com today.

I won't be able to install it until I get home tonight, so let me know any feedback if any of you have installed one and have it running.

Thank you.

 

[bonkers325]

yeah i want to know
lmk

 

[Rickard]

I'm highly interested in this to, info ASAP plz

 

[dakost]

Bearing in mind that many coppermine cpu's can be overclocked at around 133 - 150 fsb, i think that Abit made have done a booboo with the new 815 motherboards. The fsb's supported in that range are 133,137,140,145,150 and 153 which is also the maxmum speed. Nothing
amazing ! Lets say your coppermine runs fine at 140 but doesn't do
145, there is nothing inbetween ! Moreover, unless i am mistaken
the Abit SE6 doesn't support vio voltage tweaking. Can anyone verify
this ? In which case speeds above 145 fsb are usually a no go since
most of the available Pc 133 sdram require the increase of vio to
operate stably above 145 fsb.

 

[Rickard]

I have had 3 sticks of different RAM. Samsung, Apacer etc.. I have never increased VIO voltage ever. Check below for overclocked CPU's i have o/c and to what speed with mem speed 1/1.

550E @ 852Mhz
600E @ 888Mhz
650E @ 1007Mhz - Vapochill
800E @ 1070Mhz - Vapochill

I might be misinformed but it's not very likely (not often) that the VIO voltage is the kulprit when going very high in FSB. I agree that the Abit board is missing a few importent bus speeds.

 

[fxsts]

I's a bummmer that I cannot install SE6 until 7/5 as I am having so many guests coming in for the holiday.

I will post my feed back as soon as I finish installing it.

Regarding the voltage tweak, according to the manual, it comes with it. It comes with Softmenu II, so the overclocking features are similar to BX-6, BH-6, or BE6 rather than BE6-2 or BP6. It does not come with that many FSB's like their Softmenu III.

I have heard that Asus board has more FSB selection.

I bought it because I can get rid of the slocket, overclocked AGP, and I do not have to put up with VIA.

So far 815e does not perform as well as BX, but BX has been around for 2 years, and there have been many BIOs tweaks to improve the performance of the chipset. It is a little to early to make a judgement on 815e yet.

Also, I just had to try somthing new as always.

 

[dakost]

Rickard i will disagree about the vio. I have a 650e cb0 flip chip
and it can do 155 fsb with 4:3 memory, 1.7V vcore and 3.3V vio. At
155 fsb and 1:1 memory it hungs up randomly. At 150 fsb and 1:1 memory, 1.7V vcore and the vio at 3.3V it ocassionally gives me the blue screen after heavy gaming sessions. When i take the vio to 3.5V there is no problem whatsoever. The mobo is an MSI 6199VA which is an apollo 133 (not A) and i am using an Iwill II slocket. The cpu cooler is an Alpha with a Delta 38cfm 'turbine' ... i think that after the summer i will put the 24cfm sunnon back. The memory is 2 x 128 Mb Pc-133 Crusial Micron.
Bearing in mind that everything works ok at 4:3 and 155 fsb i can only conclude that the problem is the memory. Since i increased the vio to 3.5V i can do 150 fsb with memory 1:1. Anything with memory 4:3 in
this mobo gives an appauling memory throughput even after using Oda's
Wpcrset - Wpcredit to make the 'In order depth Queue 4-level and
the interleave 4way. And of course memory CAS is set to 3.
By the way, my old 550e had exactly the same behaviour !

Also it has been reported in various sites that on fsb's above 150 tweaking the vio can help. From what i have seen, most ocking reports with anything above 160 include some vio tweaking and usually only 1 dimm to achieve stability. Also some motherboards like for example the Asus cusl2 have the default voltage set at 3.4V. This may be partly due to some AGP cards having problems at 3.3V but may also be to make the mobo's more stable in case the user runs at high fsb.


fxsts
So the SE6 has both vio and vcore tweaking ?

 

[IceStorm]

I've had one since June 23rd. They came out June 20th from www.atacom.com. I ordered the SE6 and a retail PIII-650 cb0 stepping.

First, it won't work with more than one DIMM of PC133 ECC SDRAM, either 128MB or 256MB in size. I think the extra two chips on the ECC DIMM are what causes it problems. Even with a single DIMM, it can't do the extended POST (three RAM counts) without rebooting itself more than half the time, even at 100 FSB. I tried three different 128MB PC133 ECC SDRAM DIMs, in different combinations and slot orders. No good.

Unless they hid it, I can't find a VIO jumper. I wish there was one, too, for the above problem.

Ok, that's the bad news.

The good news is that my PIII-650 is sitting on a 150FSB, at 975, no problems, with a single stick of 128MB PC133 ECC SDRAM from www.crucial.com (all my PC133 128's are Crucial, the 256 one is Micron on a 3rd party PCB). The 256MB DIMM was holding me back, only working at 133 FSB. Anything higher, and the board couldn't boot Winblows without registry errors.

I've ordered a non-ECC PC133 256MB DIMM from www.crucial.com. It should be on on Wednesday. I can post my results then.

The board is mated to a Voodoo5-5500, which scores roughly 4700 3D Marks at 975, up 500 from 4200 3D Marks at 866. I've also got a SB Live! and 3Com 3C905b in the machine. HD is a 40GB Maxtor, 7200 RPM. DVD-ROM is a Toshiba SD-M1212. CD-RW is a Mitsumi CR-4802TE.

The hubbing architecture still causes DVD burps if I do other things while playing back a DVD. I think the problem is either the i815 drivers, or the DVD software. I need to get the 3dfx DVD proggie at some point.

So far, nice board. I'll probably never use the onboard audio, but having the video was useful for pre-installation testing.

Just my $0.02

 

[fxsts]

I spared one hour and replaced Soyo 6BA+III with Abit SE6. I installed three 128MB non-ECC SDRAMs (one PC100 CAS2 and two PC133 CAS3), and it ran fine at 133Mhz bus.

Installation went fairly smoothly although I did not have enough time to install 815e drivers.

It does not have VIO setting (I did not see dakost's post carefully). It only comes with core voltage tweaking same as other Abit boards with SoftMenu II instead of III.

What is good about the board is that it seemed much more stable than Soyo 6BA+III with Asus slocket set-up.

My cB0 P-III 700 was not very stable on Soyo 6BA+III + Slocket at 933Mhz, but I did not see any problem running the chip at the speed on SE6.

I will look more into it when I get more time and run some benchmarks to test the stability as well as the performance.

 

[dakost]

IceStorm
Interesting that your micron memory does 150fsb at default vio.
Ever tried 155 fsb with your micron memory ? As i said above, mine
can't get at 150 with 1:1 timins unless i raise the vio to 3.5.
I'm waiting to see what kind of fsb's the MSI 815e Pro and 6309 v3.0 and the Abit VH6 have, and whether they have vio tweaking. If they don't i think i'll got for the Asus cusl2.

fxsts
Don't you think that if you avoid mixing Pc-100 and Pc-133 you should
be able to get your 700 to oc higher than 933 ?

 

[Bingo13]

IceStorm,

Did you load the SW bios? I have my P3-866 at 975mhz and it has been rock stable with the SW bios using (2) Mushkin rev.2 PC133 DIMMs. I have the Pioneer 16x with the V5500 and have not had any issues with DVD playback using the 3dFX supplied software.

I have been running my new P3-700 at 980mhz for the last two hours without issue also. It goes south in Q3 or UT instantly at 1015mhz but will boot into windows and do internet/mail/excel just fine. Will try running the benchmarks next to see if it is the chip or further tweaking is required. Cooling is not an issue at this point.

 

[fxsts]

dakost,

Actually, I tried 933Mhz with PC133s alone as well as PC100 & PC133s combined on Soyo 6BA+III. Either way, the stability of my PIII-700 was the same. In fact, my PC100 CAS2 does 133Mhz with CAS3 setting.

I was running the same Geforce card at 142Mhz bus on the board with PIII-500e, AGP was not the problem.

My take was that limit for the chip on the setup (Soyo board and slocket) was around 900Mhz. The same chip seemed more stable on Abit SE6. By eliminating the slocket, you can often improve the overclocking ability of the chip slightly. Also, some boards are more overclockable than others.

I still need to run some benchmarks on SE6 at 933Mhz (i.e. 3dmark2000) to check how stable it really is.

 

[Baller]

Does the SE6/SL6 come with a built-on LAN adapter? Intel's site says the 815's do, but abit's site doesn't list it in the features list..

 

[IceStorm]

- No LAN port. The LAN hardware is built into the i815E's "south bridge". You need the CNR card to access it.

My FSB options max out at 153Mhz. It ran at 153 FSB (995 Mhz) for half an hour or so, but Q3A locked up. Decided to throttle back until I could get another DIMM and a new BIOS, as the speed boost from 975 to 995 didn't make a difference to Q3A.

SW BIOS? The only one I see on their website is the one that it came with. Where are you getting the updated BIOS, and is it considered beta? I've never used an Abit board before.

There's no option to increase VIO that I can find. My RAM is PC133, which means 18 chips to be powered instead of 16 chips, per DIMM. I think that's why it fails to boot when more than one DIMM is inserted. Two chips over rated is fine (18 vs 16), but 4 chips over rated (36 vs 32) is too much, I fear. I'll know Wednesday, as I'm getting a non-ECC 256MB DIMM from Crucial that day.

 

[bonkers325]

sounds like i wont buy it then
ill wait

 

[Bingo13]

IceStorm,

The bios is no longer beta and can be located here:

ftp://ftp.abit.com.tw/pub/bios/se6/

 

[fxsts]

I finally found time to work on my new setup, Abit SE6 & P-III 700.

It actually is pretty stable board, and my P-III 700, which did not do 933Mhz with both Soyo 6BA+III and Epox 6VBA2 together with Asus slocket, is running fine at 933Mhz completing 3dmark2000 couple of times in a row.

The only problem I am having is with PCI slots. Although it comes with 6 PCI slots, they are pretty much shared. Slot 1 and 5 are shared together with AGP. Slot 2 and 6 are also shared, and something else is also sharing this. Slot 3 is stand alone. Slot 4 shares with USB. I have Fasktrak, Adptec SCSI, and MX300 to install, and it wasn't too easy to find the right combination. I could not install the gameport and soundblaster emulation features of MX300 using any of the PCI slots. I am using the onboard gameport instead. It might be a problem with MX300 driver or the motherboard. I guess it is to be determined.

As far as performace is concerned, unlike VIA133a, you do not feel much difference compared to BX. I need to run some benchmarks for more exact comparisons.

I think that the lower benchmarks scores of the chipset compared to BX seen in some reviews are due mainly to the immaturity of the drivers which you have to install from the supplied CD. As time goes by, I believe that the performance gets up to the level of BX.

So far, because I am able to run my PIII 700 at 933Mhz very stably, I am pretty happy with this board.

 

[SugarTooth]

fxsts -

Can you force PCI slots into their own dedicated IRQs with the SE6's SoftMenu II? If so (or even if not), how many PCI slots do you think could have their own IRQs if USB is disabled & there's no modem? I was hoping for at least 2...

Does anyone know if the IRQs can be assigned & locked with the SL6? I'm not sure if ASUS JumperFree generally allows this or not...


SUGAHTOOF

 

[SugarTooth]

Oops - I did it again. I was thinking of the new ASUS CUSL2 (815e) when I said SL6. Anyway, question still remains - do new ASUA boards allow IRQ assignment in JumperFree?

Thanks all.

 

[fxsts]

SugarTooth,

There are four combinations of PCI slots in the BIOS and you can either set AUTO or assign any IRQ.

And here are the conbinations (I think). On board sound, modem, video and oters are all disabled.

PIRQ0 -> AGP, Slot1, Slot 5
PIRQ1 -> Sloct 2, Slot 6, and Simple Comm. something (I don't know what this is, mabe CNR. You cannot disable this)
PIRQ2 -> Slot 3
PIRQ3 -> Slot 4 and USB

To answer your question, you can get 2 stand alone PCI slots, Slot 3 and 4, if you disable USB. The board come with 2 USB ports (4 outputs), but you need an optional adapter for the second port, which uses stand alone IRQ, instead of the other one (how stupid!!). You can only disable both USB ports all together (another stupid thing).

Also, it seems that the on board USB port lacks some juice. My USB ethernet adapter, which requires more power than other USB devices, did not work too well with it. I ended up installing PCI ethernet card instead.

Now all my PCI and AGP cards other than Fasttrak have shared IRQ's (sucks!!!).

 

[IceStorm]

I did some benchmarking, just the memory bandwidth. Results are over here: http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=231099151

In a nutshell, the i815's plateauing at about 400 for FPU, and 380 for CPU bandwidth. Not good, as the 440BX keeps going up, up, up.

I'm all ears for suggestions on how to get around this, and wouldn't mind hearing how your boards are doing, memory-benchmark wise.

I'm finding that Q3A plays bettern when I'm at 891Mhz and use the RAM as CAS2 (except for cycle time), than when I'm at 975Mhz and use it as CAS3.

 

[bonkers325]

uh cas2 is of course better than cas3
i would run 133mhz bus @cas2 anyday over a 140+bus @cas3

 

[IceStorm]

Have you ever tried buying CAS2 PC133 ECC RAM from Crucial? It's either twice the price of CAS3, or nonexistant.

The bulk of my RAM is PC133 ECC. Most of my systems don't use it at 133Mhz, so I can use it at CAS2. I hadn't bothered to in a while, as most of the games I play were performing fine. It was when Q3A was "stuttering" at 975, but not at 866, that I figured there was a problem...

I knew there was a performance difference. I didn't know it was in the double-digit percentage range.

 

[dirtweasel]

excuse my ignoramance........

but, will this board allow me to run a celeron 566 at 100 fsb? i have an asus cubx that is going back asap and need a new board.

and i have had such good luck with abits!

spanks,

dirty

 

[fxsts]

My conclusion after trying all BX, 815e, VIA133, and VIA133A is that, same as many others, BX is still the best choice for Coppermine.

BX is easy to install (no additional drivers!!) and still perform the best. Especially for Celeron II, I cannot see any reason to pick anything other than BX.

I would pick 815 over VIA133A. It seems more stable and performs better although you will be paying around 50% more.

What I like about Abit SE6 is the socket 370 config. instead of socket 1 + slocket. By eliminating slocket, it seems that you can get a little more Mhz out of your CPU. Of course, this would probably be the same with BX or VIA133A boards with a S370 socket instead of Slot 1.