Friday, July 23, 1999

Introduction

Abit, one of the most innovative motherboard manufacturer on the market, strikes again... What have they blended for us this time? Yep, another super packed motherboard with lots of features not found anywhere else and I named the Abit BE6. One of the big surprise of the new BE6 motherboard is its onboard ATA66 hard disk drives controller. As a fact, the BE6 doesn't only handle 4 IDE ATA33 hard disk drives but it also support 4 IDE ATA66 hard disks drives for a great total of up to 8 hard disk drives... Let's look in details what else has to offer this new beast from Abit in the suite of this article.

The Features

Like I said in my intro, the BE6 is ATA66 ready. To do this, Abit implemented the HPT66 Ultra DMA66 hard disk drives controller chip in its circuitry. Therefore, you can use any ATA66 hard disk drives as well as any ATA33 hard disk drives with this motherboard. Abit are even providing an 80 wires IDE cable for your ATA66 hard disk drive as this type of cable is mandatory to use any ATA66 devices.

Using the 5/2/1 design, the BE6 is including 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, 1 AGP port and 3 DIMM sockets.

The BE6 clock frequency can be selected from a choice of frequencies ranging from 66Mhz to 150Mhz without even moving a single jumper. As a fact, the BE6 is relying on the Abit Soft Menu II utility integrated into the BIOS to accomplish all the settings of the processor. According to this, from the Soft Menu II, the clock frequencies available are including: 66Mhz (1/2), 75Mhz (1/2), 83Mhz (1/2), 100Mhz (1/3), 105Mhz (1/3), 110Mhz (1/3). 112Mhz (1/3), 115Mhz (1/3), 120Mhz (1/3), 124Mhz (1/3-1/4), 133Mhz (1/3-1/4), 140Mhz (1/3-1/4) and 150Mhz (1/3-1/4).

Note that the 108Mhz, 129Mhz, 138Mhz and 148Mhz clock frequencies are gone from the preceding "Soft Menu II choice... The fractions are indicating the ratio of the PCI bus upon the clock frequency selected.

The clock multipliers can be selected from a choice ranging from 2X to 8X in steps of .5X and the processor voltage core can be adjusted from 1.3vdc to 2.3vdc in .05vdc increments.

A new setting named "L2 cache Latency" has been added in the Soff Menu II. This setting let you adjust the processor L2 cache speed among sixteen different settings. The higher the number the faster the L2 cache will run.

Finally, the BE6 Soft Menu II is also incorporating the SEL66/100# function. This feature when set to low will allow to use a different multiplier on some processors.

Additional features such as: Wake On LAN, PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, USB connectors, Irda TX/RX header, SB-Link header, Keyboard power-on, Wake On modem ring, mouse wake-up, and hardware monitoring including fan speed, voltages, CPU and system environment temperature plus one thermal header for other temperature monitoring.

Below, we have a picture of the Abit BE6 motherboard and a good view on its components layout;

Installation

The installation of this motherboard is totally storyless for as long as you don't mess up the installation of the ATA66 controller. Thus, the trick is to first determine how much ATA33 drives you are going to use and then turn off the unused IDE channel into the BIOS. After you have completed your configuration, you start your Win98 installation as usual and once it is completed then you carefully follow the Appendix D instruction of the users manual to install the drivers for the ATA66 controller.

The Software Bundle

The software bundle included with the Abit BE6 includes: a CD version of the users manual, Xstore Pro, the HPT66 ATA66 hard disk drives controller drivers, Intel Bus master drivers, BIOS flashing program, Win95 PCI bridge drivers, the Hardware Doctor system health monitoring utility and a low level hard disk drive formatting utility. Other applications such as a screen saver, Acrobat reader, Dynadoc Reader, the Abit Web site and a freeware section including: PointCast Network and Inforia Quest98 are also included.

Continue on next page with The performance tests results