You better believe it's good.
Written: Aug 21 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Onboard Temp. Monitor, 27 FSB Settingsm Onboard Ultra ATA 66
Cons: Bad ATX connector placement.
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| maxxmax's Full Review: Abit BP6 Motherboard |
Yet again, Abit has impressed us as the overclocking leader!. They are the only company to bring us a dual Socket 370 motherboard. Kiss your slotket's good-bye, because you're not going to need them! Not only that, you want onboard Ultra ATA66 support? You got it! The layout of the BP6 is very similar to the BX6-2, but unlike the BX6-2, this motherboard is packed with features. So what you can do with this motherboard?
How about 27 FSB's! Yes 27 of them babies! Ranging from 66 MHz to 133MHz.
Not only that, but with the one-third PCI and one-half AGP divider, you don't have to worry about overclocking your PCI and AGP cards!
Here are some of the possibilities you can do with this baby!
For AGP, if you use 1/2 it divides the AGP bus by two. Hence, at 90 MHz the AGP bus will be 59.94 MHz, A little under clocked, but closer to the default of 66 MHz then 90 MHz is.
At the 92 MHz bus the 1/3 divider takes in place, which allows the PCI clock speed to be much closer to default.
Underclocking the AGP doesn't hurt anything, but it does slow down your graphics card. At 58 MHz, we noticed a hit in performance, but at 64 MHz, performance was indistinguishable.
With the BP6, you can even use two different CPU's, although I don't suggest that at all. It is much harder to overclock that way, because any overclocking will affect both CPU's.
More Features:
Independent Voltage Adjustment:
By far, this is one of the best features of this motherboard other then the supported bus speeds. Say you got two Celeron 366 CPU's that do 550 Mhz. One does it at 550 Mhz 2.0V and the other 550 Mhz 2.1V Well, you can still use em! You can set one to 2.0V and the other to 2.1V. Problem solved!
Onboard Ultra ATA 66
The BP6 uses a Highpoint HPT366 Ultra ATA 66 Controller. This also operates your standard PIIX4 Ultra ATA 33 controller. You can hook up to 8 IDE devices to this motherboard! Although, only four of those can be ATA 66. The ATA 66 controller features its own BIOS and operates similar to a SCSI controller. It requires a Windows 95/NT driver as well.
BXChipset Heatsink
A small benefit, but the BP6 features a heatsink on the BX chipset that is twice as high as other Abit motherboards.
Onboard Temperature Monitor
The Abit BP6 provides excellent temperature monitoring capabilities. Under each Socket 370 are two thermistors, one under each CPU. Also included is a Winbond Hardware Monitoring utility. There are 3 fan connectors on the motherboard, 2 of which are CPU's. Another plus of this motherboard is the price. This is by far the cheapest solution to have dual Celeron! The cheapest slot motherboard will run you $147 (plus the cost of slotket's), while the Abit BP6 only costs $130 with no need of slotkets.
Downsides:
Although, I must admit this motherboard is really a work of art, it has some downsides. One of them is placement of the ATX connector. It is in the worst possible position! It is in the same place the BX6-2 connector is. The connector has to go over and under the Dual CPU's. Another problem is the placement of the two Socket 370 sockets. The sockets are very close to each other and surrounded by capacitors. Don't expect to put any large monster heatsinks on this setup.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
maxxmax
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Member: Maxwell Anderson
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 3 members
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