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ABIT BE6-II Review

This is a very cool mainboard on i440BX. It supports UltraDMA/66 and Slot 1 CPUs. A really good choice for extreme overclocking.

by FastSite
10/01/1999 | 12:00 AM

Well, the situation with the mainboards appears pretty interesting today. In twoweeks Intel introduces its new chipset - i820, which is supposed to replace i440BX, andthe mainboard manufacturers seem to have nothing to do with it. They keep on making oldboards and announcing new boards based on the old i440BX and don't seem to be willing toshift to Camino. Probably everybody stumbles at the fact that i820 chipset can work onlywith superexpensive Direct RDRAM memory and the only possibility to make it support theold PC100 is to install an additional MTH controller microchip. As for all the otheradvantages of i820, such as AGP 4x and Ultra DMA/66, the expected performance gain dueto the first advantage seems pretty doubtful, because all the latest graphics cards canboast sufficient local graphics memory, and the second one can be easily introduced inBX-mainboards as well. The systems based on i820 will win wide popularity only in December,and until then i440BX will for sure dominate the market, as to some Taiwanese mainboardmanufacturers. Of course, this will be true only if Intel doesn't completely stop theirmanufacturing.<%BANNER[article]%>

And this is where the main problem with BX-mainboards hides. The manufacturing of i440BXchipsets has already become so low that Intel can't satisfy all the mainboards manufacturers'needs by providing only one third of the required amount. That is why the mainboardmanufacturers are often unable to meet the wishes of their customers and hence theyhave to invent a thousand other ways not to lose the customers' interest towards theirproducts. ABIT seems to have been guided by this particular logic that's why right afterits famous BE6 mainboard it launched a new product - BE6-II. And again ABIT managed toimpress the users with its new offspring and to introduce an absolutely new feature, whichisn't yet carried out in any other products - 200MHz system bus frequency. A bit later inthis review we are going to figure out if this solution is really worth it, and now we suggestlooking at the BE6-II specs list:

Specifications

ABIT BE6-II mainboard is supplied in ABIT's usual blue box, which also contains aset of cables with one additional UltraDMA/66 cable, a detailed user's manual, a CD withIntel and Xstore drivers and WinBond monitoring program, a floppy disk with HPT366 controllerUltra DMA/66 drivers for Windows 95/98/NT and a special sensor for temperature measuring, whichcan be connected to the mainboard by means of a 30cm wire.

Closer look

Together with the announcement of BE6-II ABIT also launched another mainboard BF6.These two products are very similar with the only exception: BE6-II supports Ultra DMA/66and has 5 PCI slots, while BF6 doesn't support Ultra DMA/66 but has 6 PCI slots instead.This decision is pretty understandable: since the appearance of ASUS P3B-F showed that thesolutions with 6 PCI slots enjoy wide popularity, ABIT made up its mind to keep pace withthe largest mainboard manufacturer. However, ASUS was very likely to introduce the sixthPCI slot in order to allow installing Ultra DMA/66 controller that's why it could appearabsolutely inexpedient to provide BE6-II with the same amount of PCI slots, because italready has an on-board controller. And now those users, who are not satisfied with thecontroller preinstalled into BE6-II, will have the chance to use BF6 in this case.

In order to save some money and probably also due to great similarity of BE6-II and BF6we have already pointed out, they are made on one and the same PCB and have the same set ofcomponent elements (with the only exception of Ultra DMA/66 controller and 1 PCI slot) that'swhy everything we will say about ABIT BE6-II can be undoubtedly referred to BF6 almostcompletely.

Besides 1 AGP and 5 PCI slots, which have already become a sort of a standard for modernmainboards, BE6-II also has one ISA slot. The previous version, BE6 was equipped with two ISAslots, but today when ISA is just about to absolutely disappear from the stage, the numberof these slots has become the least of all. As a result, BE6-II turned out pretty compact:it is of the same size as BE6, which means that it will feel at home in almost any ATX-case.

However, a bit disappointing is the fact that BE6-II has only three DIMM slots. In otherwords the mainboard supports only 768MB system memory while all the other competing productssupport up to 1GB. It is most likely that the traditional memory buffer used for ABITmainboards with four DIMM slots appeared too large and couldn't be placed on this boardwithout making it bigger. That's why the developers decided to sacrifice not only the bufferbut the fourth DIMM slot as well. Of course, it may turn out quite hard now to find anapplication, which will require such enormous resources, but the launching day of Windows2000 is not so far off already and, as to Microsoft recommendations, only this system willneed 256MB system memory.

As far as the general design of the mainboard is concerned, everything is OK here. Theevolution of BE6-II lasted quite long: all the four of its predecessors (BX6, BH6, BX6Rev.2, BE6) simply made the developers eliminate all the hitches in terms of componentslocation. You can easily install full-size cards in all slots except ISA. DIMM slots aresituated very close to the chipset, which should help increase the stability especially whileoverclocking. And the last thing: the main drawback of BE6 - a too large chipset heatsink, whichhindered the installation of any other larger CPU cooling systems - is finally removed. Nowthey equipped the chipset with a standard size heatsink. However, there is still oneupsetting detail, which spoils the glowing picture: the power supply connector is not soconveniently located - right behind the processor.

And now let's pass over to more pleasant peculiarities of the product. As we have alreadymentioned, the mainboard is provided with the integrated High Point HTP366 Ultra DMA/66controller, which allows connecting four additional devices supporting this protocol. Thus,ABIT BE6-II lets you connect up to eight IDE-devices, four of which can work in Ultra DMA/66regime.

In the lower right corner of the board you can notice a very unusual thing for ABITmainboards: a set of dip-switches for system bus frequency and clock multiplier setting.However, these switches are intended for a slightly specific purpose. Since all ABITmainboards are first of all intended for overclockers, the values set through SOFT MENU,which serves to change the processor parameters via BIOS Setup, are always prior to thevalues set by means of dip-switches. But in case you need to clear the settings made throughSetup if you overoverclocked the CPU or if it doesn't get started, the CPU will start workingnot at its minimal frequency equal to 233MHz but at that set by dip-switches. That is why weconsider the solution with the dip-switches to be very successful. However, you should alwayskeep in mind that as soon as you install ABIT BE6-II into the PC case this block will be veryhard to reach: floppy drives and harddisks will prevent you from getting to it easily. But, onthe other hand, you will hardly need to switch them too often, don't you think so?

You saw in the specs that ABIT also uses Award BIOS version 6.0 as ASUS does. The range ofthe options available was enlarged and the access to them via Setup became more convenient. Setupnow allows assigning IRQs to PCI slots as well as fine tuning of all memory timings.

ABIT BE6-II hardware monitoring is carried out on Winbond 83782D microchip. It controlstwo fans of the three, which can be connected to ABIT BE6-II, nine voltages and threetemperatures, one of which can be taken with an external sensor included in the package.

In conclusion, we would like to mention that BE6-II, as a few other new mainboards,can boast colored marking of the external connectors, which meets PC99 specification. Andbesides the mainboard also has two SMBus, SB-Link, Wake-on-LAN and Wake-on-Ring connectors.

Overclocking

No one will deny that one of the most interesting questions, which should be discussedwhen we speak about ABIT mainboards, is overclocking. ABIT is famous as a manufacturer, whichpays special attention to overclocking and constantly introduces new functions in order tosatisfy the growing demands of extreme users. Every newly born mainboard from ABIT preparesus a small surprise: a couple of new options in SOFT MENU, which help the CPU to reach higherworking frequencies. For example, if we take our mainboard, ABIT promised it to support up to200MHz FSB frequency.

However, ABIT BE6-II SOFT MENU even looks differently compared to the previous versions. Andhere we can blame firstly new Award BIOS ver. 6.0 and secondly, the new options. But let's takeour time and consider the SOFT MENU more attentively.

Due to the new Realtek RTM520-39D clock generator (by the way, Chaintech is alreadyusing similar microchips everywhere) ABIT BE6-II supports 119 different system bus frequencies.This range includes 66, 75MHz and all the values between 83 and 200MHz taken with the step equalto 1MHz. Well, we believe you haven't yet seen anything like that, have you? However, this richnesscan't make you profit as much as you probably hope to. Of course, if the FSB frequencyexceeds 140-150MHz, the proper work of the memory, AGP and PCI is really doubtful.

The clock multipliers now available in BIOS are up to 8x. However, if you change the clockmultiplier in BIOS Setup, it will hardly influence the performance of the today's CPUs becausetheir clock multipliers are locked. But instead it is possible to change the dividers for PCIand AGP buses. In the first case you can set them equal to 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4, and in the secondcase - to 1 and 2/3. Unfortunately, i440BX chipset doesn't allow to divide FSB frequency by morethan 2/3 and it considerably restricts the system's overclockability with the AGP graphics cards,which can't stand when the AGP frequency differs greatly from the standard 66MHz.

Nevertheless, ABIT does its best to provide higher system stability when working at high FSBfrequencies. As a result, we now have two new options in SOFT MENU (we have already seen the firstone in ABIT BE6 BIOS): Level 2 Cache Latency and In-Order Queue Depth. Level 2 Cache Latencyallows increasing L2 cache latency and hence the CPU performance can become a couple of tensof megahertz higher in many cases. The performance drop caused by the cache access time appearsnot so significant and fails to absorb the acceleration. And In-Order Queue Depth disables thebus pipelining between the North Bridge and the processor, which can also contribute greatly tothe overclocked system stability though again accompanied by a slight performance drop.

As for the traditional processor core voltage change, the voltages between 1.3 and 2.3V withthe step equal to 0.05V are now at our absolute disposal. We found it especially pleasant thatthis range starts with 1.3V, because the low voltage like this can be very urgently needed prettysoon. It will be particularly necessary for processors, which core is manufactured with 0.18micron technology. Besides, it's also nice that ABIT added the memory, AGP and chipset voltageschanging option to its SOFT MENU. It was already introduced in a lot of other mainboards quite awhile ago providing higher system stability in case of emergency.

Speaking about the practical value of overclocking, we can say that if we disregard allthe exotic features typical only for this particular mainboard, ABIT BE6-II will allowoverclocking processors up to almost the same level as the competitor mainboards, for instanceASUS P3B-F. However, the new SOFT MENU functions absent by other mainboards can provide anotherfew megahertz if it is the CPU and not the memory or the graphics card, which tries to resistoverclocking. We can't promise that you will get real, practical, performance increase, butanyway you will be able to boast an incredible frequency value.

Performance

Now we have to devote some time to performance. The testing system was configured as follows:

We tested the board with the following applications:

Here are the results:


Well, nothing to be surprised at. All the predecessors of ABIT BE6-II worked very quicklyand BE6-II also works quickly. Although the notion "quickness" is pretty relative for amainboard: the performance of various products made on one and the same chipset hardly differsthat noticeably.

Conclusions

Of course, the world didn't change with the launching of a new ABIT mainboard but BE6-IIaccumulated all the innovations, which can be introduced in a mainboard based on i440BXchipset. And if you are going to buy a new mainboard based on i440BX chipset, closing youreyes to i820, then ABIT BE6-II is undoubtedly worth your attention at least due to its SOFTMENU.

Highs

Lows

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