Monday, December 13, 1999

Introduction

It was several months ago that I first reviewed the Abit BE6 original edition. Since then, Abit has released a new version of that motherboard, known as the BE6-II. This article, then, will seek to pry into the differences that separate this board from its predecessor; especially as concerns performance and functionality.

The Features

By integrating the Highpoint Technology HPT366 ATA66 hard disk drive controller, the BE6 revision 2 supports ATA66 hard disk drives, as did its predecessor. Thus, the BE6-II can support up to 8 hard disk drives with 4 of them controlled by the BX chipset and the four others by the Highpoint controller.

As concerns expansion, the BE6-II possesses 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, 1 AGP port, as well as sporting 3 DIMM sockets; it is thus identical to the BE6, except for the single ISA slot.

The BE6-IIs clock frequency can be set from between 66Mhz, and 200Mhz. It's here that we see the first major differences, as the BE6-II is graced by "Soft Menu III", Award BIOS version 6.0, and a choice in clock frequencies from 66Mhz to 200Mhz that increments in steps of 1Mhz. Thus we have 134 frequency choices available with the BE6-II.

Clock multipliers are available between 2X, and 8X in steps of .5X. As well, the processor's core voltage can be varied from 1.3vdc to 2.3vdc in steps of .05vdc. In an added feature, it is also now possible to set the processor's I/O voltage from between 3,20v, and 3,9v.

The ability to adjust L2 cache Latency is also present, as it was with the BE6.

As you might expect, the BE6-II possesses a range of features for altering the operating frequencies of the PCI, and AGP busses. It is possible then, to choose ratios of 1/1, 1/3, or 1/4 for the PCI bus, and ratios of 1/1, or 2/3 for the AGP bus.

The BE6-II also incorporates the SEL66/100# function, which permits the deactivation of the multiplier lock feature present on several processors, as well as In-Order Queue Depth, which allows the activation or deactivation of the processor's pipelining ability.

Finally, the BE6-II, like the BE6 before it, includes the ability to manually assign IRQs. This is important, as it is often the only way to resolve problems in the case of an IRQ conflict.

next page: Features (continued)