ABIT BE6-II v2.0

Company: ABIT
Product: BE6-II v2.0 Motherboard
Street Price: ~ $120
Complete Motherboard Spec's: http://www.abit-usa.com/english/product/motherboards/be6r2-20.htm
Date Reviewed: November 19, 2000
Reviewed By: Jason

Stability:

Being a BX based board means having to live with with a maximum AGP divisor of 2/3. Running at 100Mhz is the maximum "supported" speed, however newer video cards seem to be able to handle being out out spec. If a BX board is run at 133FSB, the AGP bus would be at 88Mhz, which is okay for most. However, we were able to hit 150FSB running completely stable with our GF2MX video card! This meant that our AGP bus was at a screaming 100Mhz!!!

Keep in mind that the BE6-II (along with many newer boards) allows you to adjust your I/O voltage, the default for this board is 3.5v which gives added stability over the traditional 3.3v. By increasing the I/O voltage in theory you can get a cleaner signal, and thus be able to obtain higher speeds. Even at 150FSB I didn't need to up the I/O voltage! However anything past 150FSB wouldn't run stable, no matter how much I increased the core & I/O voltages, but I believe this is partially the limitation of the CPU.

Test System:

Below is a list of the relevant hardware components used in the tests:

HPT370 BIOS:

The 370BIOS is pretty straight forward, and you don't even need to go into the setup unless you are going to setup a RAID array. As you can see in the picture below I had a striped array set up with a 20GB ATA/66 drive and a 30GB ATA/100 drive. This shows how flexible & forgiving the new breed of RAID controllers are. You no longer have to have matched drives, you can pretty much slap anything together and the system will make it work. However for optimal performance it is still a good idea to try and get a matched pair.

(Click For Bigger Picture)

Just ATA/66

Just ATA/100

Together Striped

The WD ATA/66 drive yielded a benchmark of 16,587, the Soyo 7VCA which is a VIA based chipset with the same CPU (at the same speed) and same HD yielded only 13,685. That's a jump of about 3,000 points. Keep in mind this is the High Point 370 chip vs. the VIA southbridge. The BX chipset itself only supports ATA/33 which essentially means it is useful only for CD-ROMs & Zip drives (and old HDs).

The Maxtor ATA/100 drive yielded a benchmark of 20,583, just edging past the WD drive by 4,000 points. Fortunately ATA/100 drives are becoming the standard so you are not paying an extra cost for such little performance gain. Hard drives in general are falling in price daily it seems.

When striped the two drives churn out a score of 31,808! Now that's a nice gain in performance! This is just on par from other benchmarks I have seen with similar drives. Keep in mind this is combining an ATA/66 & ATA/100 drive of different sizes! Having matched ATA/100 drives *might* yield even more of a performance gain (nothing astronomical, but still).

Lets Get On With More Benchmarks On Page 3!