ABIT, the overclockers best friend
Written: Dec 26 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: very overclocker friendly
Cons: no 1/2 AGP support
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| stevelarrison's Full Review: Abit BE6-II Motherboard |
ABIT has always encouraged people to push the limits of their machines. They do this in two ways, innovative hardware and a unique BIOS. From the days of the LX chipset when they pioneered Soft Menu and the use of 95MHz Front Side Bus speeds through the dual Socket 370 motherboards, and now, the overclockers dream the ABIT BE6 Rev. 2.
What makes this motherboard special. Aside from high quality construction that includes 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, 1 AGP slot, 3 DIMMS slots (max 768MB RAM) is that it is the first BX motherboard to support ATA-66 standards for harddrives. ATA66 drives can offer a performance boost over ATA-33 in high data transfer situations. This is done by integrating a Hotpoint ATA-66 controller. This card normally sells for about $50 by itself, yet the ABIT BE6/2 is cost competitive with boards that don't include the extra controller.
In addition to the hardware improvements, ABIT has really gone wild with Soft Menu. This motherboard supports 120 different bus speeds. If you don't know the relevance of bus speed, please see my report on overclocking the Pentium III. The BE6 Rev 2 supports 66MHx, 75, and 83-200MHz in 1MHz increments front side buses. This is truly incredible. The reason this is important to an overclocker is easy to see. Since each processor of a given type will overclock to a different extent due to manufacturing variation, you can fine tune the maximum stable speed easier with this motherboard than anything on the market. Instead of taking say a 35MHz jump going from 133MHz to 140MHz (common interval on competing products) on a 500MHz processor, you can go in 5MHz jumps. While this makes no difference if the processor is stable at 140MHz, it does make a difference if the processor is stable at 133MHz but not 140MHz.
This board also supports choice between 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 PCI clock multipliers. This helps keep your PCI devices close to the 33.3 MHz spec. Unfortunately, this board does not get around the choice between 1/1 and 2/3 AGP multipliers. A 1/2 multiplier could be useful for higher bus speeds. As is, you have to choose your graphics cards carefully, or go with PCI graphics cards like the Voodoo 3 3000, or the Asus PCI based TNT card.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
stevelarrison
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Member: Steve Larrison
Location: Scottsdale, Az. USA
Reviews written: 171
Trusted by: 198 members
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Beer, the answer to, and the cause of all life's problems.
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