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ABit St6 or abit vh6t???

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DeathScyth_Hell

Member
Joined
Jul 11, 2001
Which one is better...the abit st6 or the vh6t also by abit...??...
Cuz the st6 only suppports up to 512 mb ram...thats kinda low...
but the vh6t supports up to 1.5 gigs of ram...and its also cheaper (the vh6t)...the only difference is the VIA chip and the 815 chips...
Which one is better??...whoever have experienced anyone of these...plz answer me...thx guys

one more question...do i have to update the bios for the vh6t to support the tualatin core??...thx again...
 
Just an opinion that you must take with a grain of salt because I only have experience with an ST6. In other words, the following are my thoughts on the ST6.

I have had an ST6 for about three weeks now. I am using it with a 1.2 Gig Tualatin. It is running stable at at 1.5 Gig (125 MHz) FSB.

It is an excellent board for overclocking because of the flexibility it allows for setting up the CPU. The option for a 1/4 divider became especially important to me because my new Adaptec 2930 SCSI card seems to be intolerant of even slightly over rated PCI bus speeds.

I have a full compliment of expansion cards (modem/vodeo capture/NIC/SCSI/audio/video). With all other previous mobos it was always a nightmare to find the right combination of cards in the right PCI slots so they would all peacefully share the available IRQs. With the ST6 I simply plugged in the cards in the order I reached for them. I do not know if the credit goes to the ST6, Windows XP, coincidence, or a combination, but everything worked perfectly without the need to juggle cards in the PCI slots.

I did have to flash the bios on this brand new board before it would properly recognize a Tualatin CPU. It was shipped with an older bios that did not know about Tualatins.

Its quality of construction appears excellent. It has an integral RAID controller but I really do not know how frequently users will take advantage of this feature. I would expect to disable the integral sound controller and use an expansion card because the audio controller is also very intolerant of an even slightly overclocked PCI bus. At 112 MHz FSB (1/3 divider) seriously noticeable audio distortion was very apparent. At 120 MHz it simply crashes with a short glass breaking screech, then silence.

The board is somewhat wider (front to back of the case) than my previous P3V4X. In smaller cases this might make for a bit of overcrowding.

It also has numerous other nice features like a conveniently located USB header so you can take advantage of front of the case USB ports. It does not have fan control available. My Enermax power supply has a fan that can be cycled as needed by the mobo. The ST6 does not support this feature.

The distribution CD that comes with the board has something called Hardware Doctor that appears might be a very useful hardware monitoring software package. Unfortunately it is 100% incompatible with Windows XP (per Abit and my experience). No upgrade is avaiable.

I hope this provides you with some useful information.
 
I've heard problems with the drivers that come with the cd, well, with other ABit boards anyway. Could one get away with installing the drivers on the CD w/out updating? I'm a lazy ***.
 
There is nothing on the CD you need. Windows should have all the required drivers native to it. Hardware Doctor is just a nice to have utility that is easily replacable with hMonitor or MotherBoard Monitor. I have installed a number of Asus and Abit boards over the years and never, without exception, used the enclosed CD's.
 
Which one should i get??...the abit st6 or the vht6??...

They both look the same...but vh6t could support more ram...and the VIA chipset is on the vh6t...but st6 has the 815 chip...
Plz help...i don't wanna regret any either one of them...
 
apples and oranges what you will notice is one may get better bandwidth then the other, the 815 has its benifits but some dont handle high FSB settings, the Vh6t is made for the tualatin and will not require a new Bios and its an all around good MB but you have the VIA chipset which i think could have better bandwidth, other then that there both good MB's if you do heavy apps and programs and you are going to get a OS that will be able to use more then 512mb of ram then the VH6T is your answer if not you may enjoy the slightly better bandwidth of the ST6.
 
In other words: The ultimate decision is yours.

As far as the RAM goes, I just don't see more than 512 Meg RAM as needed unless you are running a special purpose application that requires it. If so, the decision is already made for you. If not, its not a significant criteria to be concerned with.
 
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