ATA/66 Onboard
ATA/66 support on a motherboard is something that I have
been wanting since the beginning of the year. Intel's upcoming Camino chipset
will support that, but you are going to need to wait until the winter for it's
release. Your only other option was the addition of a Promise or another PCI
card adding support for ATA/66.
Abit on the other hand has found a way to add ATA/66
support to their motherboards, thanks to the HPT-366 Ultra DME Controller chip
from HighPoint Technologies. This chip brings ATA/66 support to the motherboard
without having to wait for Intel's Camino chipset or having to use a PCI
adapter.
Normal ATA/33 support is also on the board, bringing
support for up to 8 IDE devices on your system at once! Now you can have a
multitude of IDE devices with 4 or 5 hard drives, DVD Drive, CD-ROM and backup.
Just make sure you get a bigger case with a large power supply, because you are
going to need it. While all this sounds really neat, I don't know if it will
work however. The IRQ assigning must get crazy!
ATA-66 and UDMA66 sound fast, however you are not going to
get a 100% increase like the letter suggest. Instead you are given burst support
of 66MHz, provided the hard drive can send that level of data bandwidth to the
chip. Under testing with the 22GXP from IBM (7200 RPM 22GB drive) I was seeing
only about 15% increase performance on the average.
One advantage that ATA/66 is sure to have for systems
running NT is the fact that you can support for bandwidth when you need to. This
should make the BE6 work great as a server with only IDE hard drives, since a
large quantity of other computers could ask for data.
Performace
In a word, the performance is great. This is one of the
most stable motherboard I've ever used. In fact it may be the most stable
motherboard on the market today.
How does a Celeron 366 running at 605Mhz with default
voltage sound? The Abit BE6 was even able to work with the Celeron running at
616Mhz, not 100% stable but it runs. By comparison, the same Celeron would lock
up as it's about to log onto Windows on the BX6.
Comparing the BE6 to Asus's new P3B shows that the Abit is
more stable. The P3B was also able to run the Celeron 366 at 605Mhz, but it
needed 2.2V to get it stable. The P3B was totally unstable at 616Mhz, crashing
within a few minutes of loading.
Abit did a great job on this motherboard. In the pass when
you think of overclocker's motherboard, you think Abit. When you think of super
stable motherboard, you think Asus. Not anymore.
Next Page: Conclusion & Rating
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