Tuesday, March 23, 1999

Introduction

A new motherboard from Abit is always a sort of happening. This motherboard manufacturer is actually so appreciated by the Overclockers fanatics that each of their new products are anxiously awaited. The ZM6, using a socket 370 combined to the Intel 440ZX chipset is not going to pass unnoticed. The only fact that the ZM6 is using the BIOS SoftMenu 2 processor setup utility is speaking by itself and is enough to caught everyone's attention. Once again, we know that we are in presence of another great motherboard from this world acclaimed manufacturer. Let's look together more in details what has in reserve the Abit ZM6 motherboard for the end users.

The Features

What makes the difference between an ordinary motherboard and an Abit motherboard is the great Overclockability of Abit's motherboards. This manufacturer not only forgot no details but made great efforts to give to the end users the best versatile motherboard possible so they could gain every ounce of power out of the processor in use on their computer system. In other words, if you can't Overclok your processor on Abit's motherboards, chances are that you wont be able to Overclok it on any other motherboards anyway...

Suffice to say that the BIOS SofMenu 2 processor setup utility is allowing you to adjust the System Bus Speed, the multiplier, the PCI and AGP frequency dividers, the processor core voltage and even the SEL66/100# state without having to change a single jumper and you will all understand that if it can't be done via the SoftMenu 2 then it can't be done at all.

The ZM6, let's you choose your System Bus speed from an unpreviously equaled frequency choice ranging from 66Mhz to 153Mhz including: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 100Mhz, 105Mhz, 110Mhz, 112Mhz 115Mhz, 120Mhz, 124Mhz, 133Mhz, 138Mhz, 143Mhz, 148Mhz, 153Mhz. The multipliers are ranging from 2X to 8X in steps of .5X. Another very interesting features of the SoftMenu 2 is that the PCI bus speed is set to 1/4 for Bus speed of 133Mhz and up in order to get the best possible match of the PCI Bus to a standard operating frequency of 33Mhz. The AGP speed can also be selected to a ratio of 1/1 or 2/3 where the later means that the system Bus speed is divided by 3 and multiplied by 2 to get an AGP port speed of 66Mhz. The processor core volatge can be adjusted in steps of .o5 volts from 1.30 to 2.30 vdc.

Installation

The Abit ZM6 is probably one of the easiest motherboard to install. Because there are no Dip switch or jumper to set, all you have to do is to install your processor and memory modules before to place the motherboard in your casing. Once this is accomplished, your plug all your hardware connectors and you're ready to apply the power to the board. The BIOS is programmed to automatically recognize your processor type and adjust the settings accordingly but you can also use the BIOS SoftMenu to choose your own settings if you wish to Overclock your processor. Note that many processors possesses a built in multiplier lock to prevent the Overclocking. Therefore, even with this motherboard you might be restricted about Overclocking your processor on some area.

Functionalities

The ZM6 has 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots an AGP port and 3 memory banks. Most of the very popular features such as: Wake up on LAN, PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, Wake up on modem ring, SB-Link, hardware monitoring including fan, CPU and system environment temperature are also supported.

The Software Bundle

The software bundle included with the ZM6 is pretty impressive and includes: a CD version of the users manual, IDE Bus Master, FLASHBIOS driver, PCI Bridge driver for Win95, IDE HDD Low Lever Format utility, a short version of Abit's web site, screen saver, Acrobat reader, a freeware area including several Freeware, High Point X Store Pro and a Hardware Doctor for ZM6 setup.

The Intel 440ZX chipset

The Intel 440ZX chipset being a relatively new chipset, allow me to inform you about the differences between this chipset and the popular Intel 440BX chipset. There are two area where the 440ZX and 440BX are very different. the first one is the number of rows of memory supported whilst the second difference is the number of PCI slots that can be supported. For the sake of doing the comparison between these chipsets short and sweet, we could summarize that the BX chipset can support up to 8 rows of memory for a maximum of 512Mb of memory (or 1Gb with registered DIMMs) while the ZX can only support 4 rows of memory or a maximum of 256Mb. The last difference between these chipsets is the fact that the BX can support up to 5 PCI slots while the ZX can only support 4 PCI slots.

Continue on next page with The performance tests results