Written: 12/20/99
Written by: MotoŽ
Price: $130 ESP
Abit BE6-II Made by: Abit

Introduction

When it comes to motherboards that caters to overclockers, very few companies does it better than Abit. Abit has dominated this arena since the introduction of the first BX6. Since then Abit has continued to improve their products to stay ahead of the competition.

After the BX6 took the overclocking world by storm, Abit introduced a smaller version call the BH6. They then updated the BX6 with a BX6 v2. Then Abit decided that the BH6 needs an update also and created the BE6. Not wanting to rest on its success, Abit continued to improve its BE6 to the point where it's now call the BE-II.

The biggest change to the BE6-II over the old BE6 is the addition of more bus speed. A LOT MORE bus speeds. You can adjust the front side bus of the BE6-II from 83Mhz to 200Mhz in 1Mhz steps! This will surely make the BE6-II a top choice for overclockers.

The BE6-II includes ATA/66 support, which the BX chipset was not designed to support. Although the BX chipset was designed to be compatible with this specification, it is only capable of running at a maximum of 33 Mbytes/sec, thus offering no advantage over UDMA/33. Abit overcame this problem with the help of a specially designed ABIT hardware addition, the BE6-II, like the BE6, can support this specification at its intended 66 Mbytes/sec of data throughput. With the Ultra ATA/66 specification, this new high-speed interface doubles the Ultra ATA/33 burst data transfer rate to 66.6 Mbytes/sec.

The layout of the BE6-II has change a bit from the original BE6. The board uses 1 AGP, 5 PCI and 1 ISA slot. The original BE6 had 2 ISA slots. The BE6-II shares its layout with its sister board, the new BF6. The BF6 comes with 1 AGP, 6 PCI and 1 ISA slot but no ATA 66 support. Adding ATA 66 required Abit to kill over one of the PCI slots because of IRQ conflicts. Other than that, the BE6-II and the BF6 are the same boards. So you're choices come down to whether you want 6 PCI slots or ATA 66 support.

Next Page: The specss

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