The second Abit board we had a look at is the latest version of the original BE6 board. Those of you familiar with the BE6 will know what a popular board it was, mainly for the Highpoint UDMA/66 Controller built in and Abit's renowned ability for overclocking. The BE6-II takes all the best bits of the original BE6 and improves on them, most noticeably with the inclusion of the Softmenu 3. This little baby is versatile to the extreme, allowing you to set the FSB totally through software, increasing or decreasing the Mhz one at a time. No more hoping that the CPU will run jumping the FSB from 66 to 75 to 83, you can try every one in between and above.

The board itself comes with the UDMA/66 cable and unusually also comes with a thermal sensor that can be used to check on the temperature of the component you attach it to. It also comes with the motherboard driver CD, a driver disk for the Highpoint UDMA/66 controller and a very comprehensive professional manual.

We used a PIII 550 to benchmark the board and Windows 98 installed without any problems. After installing the Highpoint driver that came with the board, everything was recognised fine and we started playing with the system. The motherboard was set exactly as it came out of the box with the only thing being set was the CPU which was set to 5.5X 100Mhz, so the CPU was running at its default settings. The system was perfectly stable as should be expected and turned in a very respectable Winstone score of 23.8 and an equally good 3D Mark 2000 score of 2618. This is a very good result for any board in its default configuration so we thought we better have a look at the BIOS. After setting everything to its optimum and benchmarking again, we got an increase of 0.4 Winstones which is roughly an increase of 2% in overall performance giving a great score for a PIII 550 CPU based system.

Windows 2000 caused a lot more trouble installing, but we were wise to it by then after our experiences with the BP6. Because both boards use the same Highpoint UDMA/66 controller they both suffer the same problem with Windows 2000 by having to be quick and press F6 at the beginning of the installation to install the UDMA/66 driver. Again, we used the downloaded version 1.22 of the driver rather than the one shipped with the motherboard and had no problems. The Winstone returned a very fast score of 29.5 which again, is very good for a PIII 500. The 3D Mark result was equally good, giving us a result of 2618 which is great for a standard TNT2 based card running on that CPU. We then returned the BIOS settings to their default values to which the board had been shipped with and got a result of 0.6 Winstones, less which would about coincide with the difference the BIOS settings made to Windows 98. The 3D Mark score was disappointing coming in at 2594, which, although fast, shows that Windows98 is still the operating system of choice for playing games.

Conclusion

With Intel 'Clock Locking' the multipliers on all their CPUs now, the only real way to get increases above what the CPU was designed to run at is to increase the FSB the processor is running on. If a PIII 500 is designed to run at 5X 100Mhz, the increasing the FSB from 100Mhz to 115Mhz would get the CPU running at 575Mhz. Not only that but the memory access will be faster as well. The only downside to all this is that all of the busses running on the motherboard (PCI, AGP etc.) operate on a derivative of the CPUs FSB so you will be running all the cards in the system faster as well. This is where you'll suffer when you decided to buy that clone video card that was £10 cheaper at the time. Chances are it won't be able to handle the increased bus speed and will start causing system crashes, non-booting etc. The most important thing though is the memory; make sure the Cas Latency is set ideally to level 2 or if not to level 3, make sure you have 7 nanosecond but preferably 6 ns PC100 memory in the machine, to achive the faster clock speeds.

The Abit BE6-II allows you to squeeze every last Mhz out of the system and allows you to decide where you want to compromise the performance to ensure you still have a rock solid system. You are more likely to have problems because of deficiencies in the other components you are running rather than the motherboard itself. We had a Coppermine CPU running at 133Mhz working absolutely fine on the system although we couldn't get the system above 115Mhz using the memory we had been doing the testing with, which was still good quality 7ns PC100 memory.

If you're thinking about putting together a new system yourself or upgrading your current system, the Abit BE6-II should be top of your list. Even if you're not an avid overclocker, the board screams quality at you and still turns in very fast results running at its default settings. Add to the fact that the BE6-II gives you unparalleled upgrade path in the future who needs an i820 chipset anyway?

Congratulations to Abit on winning one of the first ever One2surf awards !!

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