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

More Sandra Benchmarks:

The P3-550 running at 150FSB meant it was churning along at 825Mhz (and quite happily I might add) @ 1.85v. I have a complete lineup of Sandra 2k benchmarks for comparisons.

What do these numbers mean? Well a CPU scores pretty much the same across different chipsets (i.e. VIA, BX, 815E, 820, etc..) since it is just the raw power the CPU can crank out. A good comparison would be an engine in a car. Take a Ford 427 side-oiler with dual quad intakes. :) Sure this engine can be tweaked to churn out over 500 horsepower (like overclocking the CPU), and no matter what kind of car you can fit it into, the 427's horsepower is unaffected.

Memory however varies greatly across different chipsets, and AMD seems to have the leading edge on memory bandwidth thanks to it's EV6 bus architecture. At 150FSB our BE6-II was screaming raw power! With a benchmark of 462ALU / 527FPU, our P3 @ 825 just edged past SiSoft's numbers for a 1Ghz Athon! When comparing the same P3 on the 7VCA (VIA chipset again) it just blew it out of the water! The Soyo board only produced 315ALU /361FPU! Ouch, that's gotta hurt! People say that the VIA chipset will never be as good as the BX in memory performance, but with VIA dominating the chipset market they really should figure something out to get that extra "umph" in the memory performance.

I tested three different sticks of memory, all exceptionally high quality in my option. They were Corsair's 128MB & 256MB PC133 CAS2 sticks, and Memory Man's Mosel Vitalic 128MB PC133 CAS2 stick. All three memory sticks worked just great at 150FSB with no quirks or need to bump the I/O voltage over the preset 3.5v!

Multimedia numbers are more related to the CPU again, showing MMX/SSE/3DNow! performance. Again comparing to the 7VCA with the same setup, the BE6-II scored 2,600 MMX / 3,461 SSE & the 7VCA scored 2,455 MMX / 3,268 SSE. Minimal difference between the two, probably attributed to when memory calls came into play.

3D Mark 2000:

Mad Onion's 3D Mark 2000 has been among one of the most popular benchmark / stability tools around. I also like to use Quake 3 Arena for stability testing, both programs push your system, in particularly your video card, to it's limits. They will definitely lockup or show really crazy graphics if your system is the least bit unstable. I have had times when 3D Mark 2k would lockup and Q3A would run fine, and Vice Versa. And with that here's the proof of successful completion of 3D Mark 2000. I did have it running in loops overnight just to be 100% sure, along with other programs running in the background.

I'm sorry I don't have any screen shots from Q3A, they got lost somehow and I don't have access to the setup at the time of this writing. However I did have Q3A running with a bunch of bots on a CTF map with the camera on one of the bots the whole time. Anyone else notice when you set them on nightmare mode that they are more concerned with killing each other than they are capturing the flag?

Take Me To Page 4 For The Final Conclusion!