For Those Who Want a System That Works
Written: Apr 30 '00 (Updated May 01 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: i/o features, chipset capabilities, bios options, overclocking ability
Cons: watch battery engineering
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| saveth's Full Review: Abit BH6 |
*note: This review is going to be directed toward power-users because, in my experience, it is generally the power-users who get picky about the motherboards they buy. Most people don't even know what a motherboard is, anyway.
I bought my ABIT BH6 motherboard in December of 1998, and to this day, it has not failed me. I was shopping around for a new computer that I would be building for myself, and one of the ways I shopped was to ask friends and colleagues about what kinds of equipment is stable, relatively inexpensive, and will work for a long time. On IRC one day, I posed a query about what motherboard I should buy, and the unanimous response was the ABIT BH6. A hundred reasons were given as to why I should invest in it.
The first thing a buyer wants to know when determining which motherboard he will buy is whether his processor is going to work with it or not. The ABIT BH6 supports a wide variety of Slot 1 processors: the Intel Pentium II 350-450MHz (at a 100MHz bus speed), the Intel Pentium II 233-333MHz (at a 66MHz bus speed), the Intel Celeron 266-333MHz (at 66MHz bus speed), and almost anything (such as the AMD K6) that is compatible with these processors.
When I bought this motherboard, I installed an Intel Celeron 300A and immediately decided to overclock it. One of my colleagues that works with Intel told me the Celeron I bought was from a batch that was highly overclockable -- a lucky purchase, I would say. I played with the settings in the BIOS menus (no jumpers or DIP switches to complain about) in order to change core voltage, bus speed, and a number of other things, and I eventually ended up being able to post my 300MHz processor at 554MHz in Windows 98 without overheating a single thing. Hence, the ABIT BH6 allows extreme overclocking, although I wouldn't suggest it if you don't know what you're doing.
The BH6's chipset is one of the more reasonable ones available for home use. It uses the Intel 440BX (82443BX and 82371EB) chipset, and because of this, the motherboard is allowed the Ultra DMA/33 IDE protocol, ACPI support, and AGP 1x and 2x Sideband (3.3V) availability. Of course, this information may not matter very much to those who are just looking for a "good motherboard to use," but for those who need power and ability, this chipset delivers both.
The ABIT BH6 supports 3 SDRAM DIMM modules with a total capacity of 384M. In light of this, one may wish to buy 3 128M DIMM modules to use with this motherboard. With ECC support, the memory access is lightning-fast and allows superb performance under any operating environment. With my motherboard, I bought a 128M 7ns pc100 DIMM module, and I have had absolutely no memory access speed problems.
It also supports a multitude of I/O functions onboard. The floppy port allows 2.88M and Mode-3 floppies, which is quite a bonus if you actually still use floppies to store stuff. The previously mentioned Ultra DMA/33 bus master IDE supports up to 4 IDE devices and thus is an Enhanced IDE system. The motherboard comes with a parallel port connector that allows Standard, EPP, and ECP connections. Two built-in 16550 fast UART compatible serial port connectors lay right next to the parallel connector. It comes with a PS/2 keyboard input and also a PS/2 mouse input, though if you don't want to use a PS/2 mouse, the serial ports will also support input devices. Even now, in the middle of the year 2000, many motherboards do not come with infrared support, but the ABIT BH6 has a built-in standard IrDA TX/RX header. The last I/O feature of the motherboard is the dual USB connectors: no USB card needed!
When I bought the motherboard, I had not had experience with the ATX form factor before, and I was utterly confused as to why it would never turn on. The motherboard controls the power supply, as opposed to the AT form factor, in which the power supply controls the motherboard.
The ABIT BH6 comes standard with two EISA, five PCI, and one AGP slot, so the user can add almost as much more stuff to the computer as he wants. The motherboard will also monitor several things about the hardware including the processor fan speed, many different voltages, and the system environment temperature. The board is 305mm by 190mm in size, so it will fit in many versions of tower cases with no problem. The screw-holes are standard, so once it fits into the case, it can be secured with ease.
Throughout my year-and-a-half experience with the ABIT BH6, I have only come across one problem, and this particular problem probably will seem rather silly: I don't like the way the clock battery is situated. One night, I was playing around with the overclocking settings in the BIOS, and I froze the motherboard, and the only way to fix this (except for the method I didn't know about) was to disconnect the computer's power and remove the clock battery. So I disconnected the power, and I went to remove the battery, but apparently, the only way to do that is to break the metal piece that holds it in. So now, I don't have a clock battery anymore, and if I decide to disconnect my computer from external power, I lose all my BIOS information and have to go in and reset everything. That's not really a big deal because my computer generally stays in one spot, but it can get annoying when I am working on it and need to constantly disconnect and reconnect the power for testing.
In effect, I love my ABIT BH6, and its features are excellent. The good things about this motherboard far outweigh the bad, so I must award it with a five-star rating.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
saveth
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Location: Dallas, Texas, USA
Reviews written: 46
Trusted by: 28 members
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