It's 'ABit' too early to call BX dead!
Written: Jul 19 '00 (Updated Jul 19 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: SoftMenu III, Overclocking Friendly, Supports Cel/P2/P3, Fast and Ultra-Reliable, Great Support
Cons: Minor complaints about ATA/66 controller, ACPI glitches?
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| dsmeyer's Full Review: Abit BE6-II Motherboard |
A few words of caution... This is a rather lengthy review and many people will find a lot of this technical stuff hard to understand. Please don't NR it if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about. A motherboard, or any sophisticated piece of computer hardware for that matter, can't be reviewed without going into all the technical jargon. This opinion contains my personal experiences about this product. The more I can tell hardware enthusiasts about this product, the better the opinion will be for them.
A few months ago I decided to hop on the Pentium 3 bandwagon and upgraded from a VIA MVP3 chipset motherboard and decided to get the ABit BE6-II motherboard. For those of you not in the know, a motherboard is the main circuitboard in your computer and is the 'brains' of your system.
I found a good deal for one of these ABit BE6-II boards on eBay for about $135. After hearing about all the horror stories with the too-integrated i810 chipset which is hardly upgradable, it looked as if our old friends, the Intel 82443BX and 82371EB, are here to stay, and better than ever after its 2 or 3 year lifespan. I had to listen to the stories and all the hype of the i810 to be convinced into buying a completely "outdated" piece of hardware.
I got the board, popped it into my case, and hooked up my Asus V3400TNT (AGP), SB Live!, Fast Ethernet Adapter, and TV/FM tuner card (all PCI) cards. I took my Pentium III 667 FC-PGA chip with Intel's heatsink cooler in the MSI slocket adapter (Socket 370/FC-PGA to Slot 1) and dropped it into the Slot 1. Next went in the RAM and all my drives. Then I was ready to rock 'n roll, right? Not quite yet.
Since my case's reset button connector was plugged in upside down to the jumper pair on the motherboard, nothing appeared on my screen when I turned it on. No beeps, no hard drive activity, nothing. OK, easy enough to figure out after 3 times of taking the system completely apart piece by piece and back together again (all of you hardware aficionados out there know what I mean)!
Ok, reset problem fixed. I enter the BIOS to set up my processor and do all my regular tweaking. What's this? The SoftMenu III technology? This is great! How very innovative. No messing with confusing jumpers to set my processor voltage, multiplier, and FSB speed, ever again! I could either choose from the big list of presets which included a bunch of frequencies for Celerons (66mhz FSB), Pentium IIs (100mhz FSB), the newest Pentium IIIs (133mhz FSB), or tweak all the CPU settings manually. Although the 133 frequency is out of spec for the aging BX chipset, most newer AGP cards should be able to deal with the 2/3 AGP multiplier while the CPU is running at 133, giving the 2X AGP an 89mhz bus speed.
The SoftMenu III lets you choose from among 120 different Front Side Bus speeds between 100 and 200 mhz, as well as 66, 75, 83-100mhz. Provided you have decent PC133 CAS2 7ns SDRAM, you ought to be able to push this motherboard over 133mhz FSB. I'm not an overclocker, but I know that some people have rumored to get this board past 155mhz successfully (that would give old AGP cards a big problem running at about 102mhz [155*2/3]). I just chose the 667 (133x5) setting and let the board do the rest of the work. Since the Pentium IIIs are, unfortunately, multiplier locked, this means you can only adjust the FSB speed. This means you risk overall system stability rather than changing the multiplier and upping the voltage a few notches. So any attempt to set the multiplier at anything else will have no effect on your system speed.
However, if you don't want to use the SoftMenu III for any reason, you can use the dip switches on the motherboard (shame on you for making things too hard on yourself).
While I'm on the topic of the hardware aspect of all this, the three DIMM slots on the BE6-II give you the capability for 768MB of system RAM. Using cheap SDRAM will not yield good results over about 115mhz, though. I bought this KingMax TinyBGA stuff from someone on eBay and it is totally unpredictable when I try to run my system at 133mhz. However, my Micron CAS3 PC133 SDRAM is an improvement.
Another main feature of the BE6-II motherboard (and the difference from the BE6) is the integrated HighPoint Technologies HPT366 UDMA/66 controller. While this controller gives you compatibility with up to 4 of the the newer ATA/66 hard drives/IDE devices, I can't tell any difference performance-wise with the Intel IDE controller and the HPT366 under Windows 98. I'm using the latest drivers (1.25, 4-6-2000). Also, the HPT366 controller is listed as two SCSI Controllers in the Win98 device manager, instead of under Hard Disk Controllers. Having the HPT366 controller on board also means you get one less PCI slot, for a total of 5 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot. Another thing I don't like about this HPT366 controller is that it involves a separate IDE device detection screen after the POST and before the system overview screen, which adds yet a few more seconds to your already long boot-up time. The HighPoint UDMA/66 controller also does not allow you to specify bootable CD-ROM drives--This means that you must have your CD-ROM(s) connected to your ATA/33 connectors if you ever want to boot from a bootable CD! Even the ABit manual that comes with this board suggests not connecting those drives to the DMA/66 channels. A slight inconvenience, but I don't like it.
After all is said and done, I go to ABit's website (quite slow it seems so often) and download the latest BIOS. These BIOS updates are generally released about once a month or every 2 months, and they have some bug fixes and enhancements such as new FSB settings and such. I flash my BIOS whenever a new one comes out, just because I like to be on the cutting edge of having recent firmware/software. The BX chipset might be a few years old, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't leave their motherboards in the past and leave new bug fixes and stuff out of the picture.
But I have found that even having the most recent BIOS installed doesn't seem to cure the problem I have when I put Windows 98 in Standby/Sleep mode. You see, my computer liked to permanently go on Standby, and refuses to wake up even after I press keys and move the mouse and such.
Is this a bug with the ACPI on this motherboard, or is it Windows 98? I will probably never know, since I can't find any helpful information on Microsoft's website.
I can't say anything about comparing the performance of this board to its rivals, since this is my first Pentium III motherboard. But, if I had to judge its speed, I'd say it's pretty fast. Combined with a Pentium III 667, it seems to be very stable and reliable in both 2D and high-performance 3D applications. I can run dozens of programs in Windows 98 simultaneously and I can hardly notice a slowdown and be lucky if I get a crash. I don't play many games, but I've found that Midtown Madness runs a whole heck of a lot faster with this board than it did with my old Epox MVP3 motherboard. But that's also due to the fast P3 processor and the 133mhz bus speeds.
Of other interest to you might be the other features of the BE6-II motherboard. You get the standard fare of PS/2 ports, serial/parallel ports, and a total of 2 USB ports. Also you get the extra 4 IDE channels with the HPT366 DMA/66 controller. Slots are 5/1/1 (PCI/AGP/ISA)-- I would have preferred having no 16-bit slots, but some people still like to have the ubiquitous ISA modem rather than an external modem. But as the BX chipset relies on ISA bus architecture, it should probably be there anyways. 6 PCI slots would have been nice, but the presense of the HPT366 controller, again, makes having that 6th slot senseless. Also, I enjoy the Hot Key wakeup function of this board, which allows you to define a Ctrl-Fxx key to turn on your computer, pretty convenient, but also standard with most modern motherboards.
This board gives you 3 "smart fan" controllers. Two of them are located near Slot 1 to give you CPU fan and Exhaust fan access, and one is located in the lower right corner for an intake fan. If you have smart fans, they can give you RPM readings in the BIOS or with ABit's Win9x Hardware Doctor program (a pretty handy app downloadable from their website, also gives you voltage, CPU and system temperature readings).
The layout of this motherboard is good overall, however I do not like draping the ATX power supply connector over Slot 1. It blocks the slocket adapter and gets in the way of the heatsink. Also, the BE6-II has WOL/WOR (Wake-On-LAN/Ring) headers, Infrared header, SB-Link (for PCI Sound Blaster support in old DOS games) header, and two SMBus (huh?) headers. It also has a thermal connector, to which you connect the included thermal sensing cable which monitors a secondary System Temperature. This secondary thermal connector is located in an inaccessible spot near the AGP slot, though, so it is a pain to reconnect the little cable if it gets yanked loose.
The board is also Y2K compliant, according to the printed manual for this board. Nothing to worry about in that department though, as we all know by now. The manual is very concise and clear. It is very well written compared to many of the other manuals out there. It gives precise descriptions for each jumper, connector, and BIOS setting and is easy to understand. This is definitely in the Plus category.
Bad news... Recently I bought a nice new case (from the company that makes Dell and Micron cases), and the Keyboard port shorts out for some reason when this motherboard is in my new case. I don't know what is causing it to short out, but I suspect it is something with the motherboard. I get absolutely no response from the keyboard while this motherboard is firmly secured to my new case, but it works fine when it's not in the case. So I have purchased an ABit SE6 motherboard, with Intel's new 815E chipset, which I hope will function well in my new case. My experience overall with this fine ABit motherboard, despite the quirks of the HighPoint HPT366 controller, has obviously been good enough to prompt me to buy ABit's latest product. This board has been handled rough at times, and I would expect a lot less from such a fragile piece of equipment after such treatment. But it takes a licking and keeps on ticking (in my old case, that is).
But for now, I am putting my trusty ABit BE6-II back in my old case, and will probably set it to the side for awhile. I hope that it finds a good use sometime in the near future. I hope my review of this board and my experiences have helped you in deciding to buy a BX motherboard. Because BX is certainly far from dead as many people are saying it outperforms the i8xx chipsets.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dsmeyer
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Member: Doug Meyer
Location: Austin TX
Reviews written: 39
Trusted by: 13 members
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