Manufacturer Supermicro
Retail Price $110

Expansion Slot : 4/3/1

As opposed to a majority of other motherboards on this roundup, Supermicro opted for the AMI WinBIOS in place of the Award BIOS. Note that Supermicro have valiantly resisted the onset of the jumperless age. Overclockers will be daunted by this board, which is just about un-overclockable- not because you have to manually change jumper settings on the board (which overclockers were doing long before anybody thought of jumperless setups...actually, the jumper setup on the P6SBA is quite straightforward) but because Supermicro does not offer any extra bus speeds apart from the standard 66/100MHz selection at all. The board will autodetect the proper bus speed for your CPU and clock your system accordingly. Pity, because the P6SBA is a rock-solid board and is one of the fastest in the roundup to boot. Meanwhile, you'll find all the jumper settings for the P6SBA in the user's manual (back to that after a while...feels like a quaint medieval custom now, what?), which incidentally is also the manual for the P6DBS, the P6DBE and the P6SBS. At first glance that may worry you, but don’t worry about it- the manual is thorough and quite reliable. It’ll walk you through the AMI WinBIOS, for starters, and gives you its recommendations on what settings should be enabled or disabled – if you decide you do want to configure it manually. The AMI WinBIOS will automatically configure your PC100 SDRAM modules for optimal performance/stability using the Serial Presence Detect on the SDRAM modules.
 

The Supermicro P6SBA uses a 4 PCI/3 ISA/1 AGP configuration (including 1 PCI/ISA shared slot), which is another one of those well-I-suppose-it’s-enough situations. I mean, not everybody needs more than 4 PCI slots, (and if you do you’ll certainly have to look elsewhere- plenty of 5 PCI slot motherboards on this roundup) and you certainly should not need more than 3 ISA slots in this day and age.  This configuration should still be able to satisfy most people, only it’s a nice feeling to have that extra PCI slot and chuck PCI peripherals around generously. The three DIMM slots, of course, should be quite enough unless you hang out with a bunch of 32MB modules. The urge to say, “an extra DIMM would have been nice too” is just a symptom of what will probably be called slotomania (an irrational fixation on slots... or something of the sort, anyway) in the medical textbooks of the mid-21st century. It’s this vague feeling at the back of our minds that leads us to secretly believe that more slots is always better -so we’ll put our foot down right now and point out that three DIMM slots are quite enough, thank you very much.

The argument may be justified when talking about PCI slots (taking into consideration the plethora of varied PCI peripherals out there just screaming to be bought) but the same argument does not necessarily apply to memory modules. (So there...) Though an extra DIMM slot would have been nice too....(grin)
 

Enough blather...back to the board. How does it perform? As you’re tired of being told now, differences in the performance of BX boards are largely negligible and it would not be reasonable to base your choice of a motherboard on its performance scores. However, you’ll be glad to hear that the P6SBA performs quite well, definitely up there with the leaders. Now let me reiterate something I mentioned earlier and which most of you won’t be glad to hear- the board is stable and it’s fast, but it’s not overclockable. If you had any notion of taking on this board in single overclocking combat and beating it down into submission, give up all such notions immediately. The point of overclocking is to get better performance at less cost, isn’t it?  Go overclock something else.

 
This does not mean, however, that the P6SBA is not a good board- it is. It’s stable and solid, it’s fast and reliable, and if that’s what you want from your BX board, that’s what the P6SBA can give you. Not a brilliant board, but a decent and dependable one. Sadly, now that BX boards are in their prime, most people aren’t willing to settle for anything less than brilliance, and steady boards that people liked or would have liked at an earlier time around when the BX chipset came out are passed over because “good” just isn’t good enough any more. We have several such boards in this roundup, and it feels odd to say no to a good board, but such is life.