A worthy purchase (Abit BE6-II)

Member Name: Islander

Product:	Abit BE6-II
Date:	12/10/00 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 4 EIDE slots, Softmenu, slots,

Disadvantages: none

I have had this motherboard for nearly a year and have found it to be excellent. It was the first motherboard that I had attempted to fit myself and it went in without any problems. I bought it with a PIII 500 CPU and the setup was a chinch as this M/B uses the softmenu method of setting CPU speeds, so no messing with jumpers.

The motherboard can be set for PII/III CPU’s upto 600 MHz (although later versions, and this one with a BIOS update can go higher in the softmenu – 800 Mhz I believe). There are options to go higher by using a manual setting and the FSB (Front Side Bus – the speed of the motherboard) can be set from 83MHz to 200MHz going up in increments of 1).

One major advantage to this M/B is the ability to plug in up to 8 EIDE devices (CD-ROM/Writers or Hard-Drives) if you have room in the case and the PSU will handle it. Two of the EIDE slots are ATA/33 and the other two are ATA/66 (with a suitable cable supplied).

Also on the motherboard are 3 x DIMM memory slots, 1 x AGP slot, 5 x PCI sots and 2 x ISA slots.

When installing a ATA/66 hard drive I was disconcerted to find the BIOS did not recognise it, and when the BIOS looks for hard drives upon booting it couldn’t find a drive (only the CD-ROM). I then found out it is not set in the BIOS, but the HPT366 controller detects it on the screen after the hard drives are normally detected – and it runs fine.

All in all an excellent motherboard, and ABIT have a very good website for finding out information and obtaining updates.

Summary: