Motherboards hurt your butt when you sit on them.
Written: May 18 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Extreme expandability and great performance under stress
Cons: It's not comfortable to sit on.
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| aslansford's Full Review: Abit BX6 |
This is one mother I don't mind getting a spanking from. I personally own this motherboard and if your into building your own system it's a great base for your super system.
The board setup is easy and self explanatory. When you enter the board software setup menu all of the options are clearly labeled with exactly what they will do. So you don't have to be afraid of putting your own system together, or for that matter setting it up.
If you buy the retail version of this board you get a CPU thermometer, case screws, one 12" IDE cable and some really cool pink plastic bubble wrap. The pink plastic bubble wrap was my favorite part. So you get everything you need to attach your motherboard to your case, attach your CPU and hard drives to your motherboard.
This board comes devoid of any built in options which is perfect for anyone interested in building a system with upgradability in mind. You don't have a built in sound or video card to worry about getting to turn off if you want to expand your systems capabilities with a new video or sound card.
This board has one slot for one Slot 1 type CPU.
It has 1 AGP video bus, the board chipset only supports AGP 2x.
It has 4 PCI Slots and 2 ISA legacy slots. One PCI slot and one ISA slot share a case opening as well as an IRQ. Which totals to 6 usable expansion slots. You can have up to 1 Gig in system memory loaded into the boards 4, 168 pin DIMM slots. The boards IDE controller can handle up to 4 hard drives and two 1.44 MB Floppy drives.
The bx6 has every right to catch your attention. The board is a little bit more expensive than other boards, but I believe that the 20 extra dollars you would pay for this board over some other board is worth the money to have all the expansion slots that this one has.
The board is ATX form factor compliant so it will fit in any ATX form factor case.
There are only three small problems that I had with this board. One is regarding the BIOS and the way it automatically sets CPU core voltage. I was experiencing random reboots after installing the board and running CPU intensive operations. I fixed this by increasing the CPU core voltage. I can only assume that the bios incorrectly set the CPU core temperature for my processor.
When I installed my AGP graphics card over my PCI one I was experiencing more random reboots and system hangs during graphic intensive programs. It turns out that the AGP slot and the first PCI slot share an IRQ when windows automatically allocates the IRQs. When I would run graphic intensive programs the IRQ conflict was too much for the IRQ mapper to handle and the system would hang or reboot. I had to move the first PCI card to another slot to avoid this annoying problem.
The third problem occured when I upgraded my RAM to a single 256 MB chip. I was experiencing random reboots. I called my RAM vendor and they said that this had happened on this board before. The board has a RAM optimizing function that optimizes memory tasks based on where the RAM is in the slot array. When the 256 MB RAM chip is in the first RAM slot the RAM optimizer doesn't work properly and can result in random reboots. So the tech support people recommended that I move my RAM chip to slot 3 to avoid the random reboots.
I am currently running my Pentium III 600 Mhz chip with 256 MB RAM and all but two of the expansion slots filled with my various gizmoes and gadgets and I haven't had a motherboard related problem since I was setting up with the new RAM chip. Which has been nearly 6 months. I enjoy using this board and I like knowing that I have room to upgrade it if I want to.
This board performs well under stressful situations. I render 3d graphics often and I've never had a hardware related problem while rendering some of most processor intensive graphics.
I would recommend this board to anyone. Make sure you look it up on www.pricewatch.com so you get the best price.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
aslansford
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Location: El Monte, CA
Reviews written: 30
Trusted by: 6 members
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