Installation
Abit made the BE6 very easy install with the help of their
well written manual. The manual provides a step-by-step instruction list that
explains every features of the board as well as explaining how you install it. I
was able to swap out the BX6 v2 for the BE6 in about 20 minutes.
The BE6 is much smaller than the BX6 v2. They are the same
height, but the the BE6 is no where near as wide. Because of this you shouldn't
have any trouble installing the BE6 into ant ATX case. The small width does have
a disadvantage however. The DIMM slots are very close to the CPU slot. The
Pentium 3 with Alpha P125 cooler just barely clear the DIMM slots. There was
about 2 mm of space left between the heatsink and DIMM slot number 1.
Installing a Celeron 366 with a SlotKET and Global Win FDP
cooler killed off 2 DIMM slots! I had to move the PC-133 RAM to DIMM slot number
3. Using an Alpha 7HO socket 370 cooler allowed me to recover one lost DIMM.
If you're going to use a BE6 motherboard, make sure your
cooling setup will clear those DIMM slots. It would really suck to put in a mega
cooled CPU only to find out you don't have a single DIMM slots for you RAM.
Overclocking
The biggest benefit of the Abit BE6 motherboard is of
course its ability to overclock your CPU. The BE6 features Abit's great Soft
Menu II. This allows you to adjust CPU multiplier, FSB, voltage to 2.3V, and AGP
divider. Everything can be adjusted in software with no need to ever open the
case.
While the number of bus speed adjustment is not as great
as the BP6, there should be enough to get the most out of your CPU. You can
chose from 66, 68, 75, 83, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140,
150Mhz bus.
The 124 and 133Mhz bus allows you to chose between 1/3 or
1/4 PCI dividers. Above that bus speed, it's all 1/4. AGP divider can be either
1 to 1 or 2/3. It's really ashamed that Abit didn't add a 1/2 divider. Without a
1/2 AGP divider, using any bus speed over 133Mhz is pretty much ruled out as
most AGP video card won't work above an 89Mhz AGP bus speed (2/3 of 133Mhz =
89Mhz AGP bus).
The inclusion of a 105 and 110Mhz bus is very welcome.
Abit has done their homework on Intel's current processor offering and has
chosen bus speed to take those CPUs to the limit. For example, I think Abit hit
the limit of my Celeron 366 dead on with the 110Mhz bus. At 100Mhz the Celeron
366 is 100% stable. Increasing the bus speed by 2Mhz to 112Mhz made the system
unstable, no matter how much voltage I used.
With the old Abit BX6 v2 I could only run the Celeron 366
at 567Mhz (103x5.5) because the next bus speed was 112Mhz, which is unstable.
Using the Abit BE6, I now have a stable 605Mhz Celeron system. :-)
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