Good board with problems
Written: Jul 28 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to overclock, good manual
Cons: ATA/66 Controller is *ver*y* buggy
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| bnlitin's Full Review: Abit BE6 Motherboard |
I've had the ABIT BE6 motherboard for over a year and it's worked great with the Pentium III 450 MHz CPU overclocked to 558 MHz (front side bus at 124 MHz).
Recently, I've upgraded the CPU to Pentium III / 800 MHz (front side bus at 115MHz) and I've encountered many problems with the onboard HPT366 ATA/66 hard disk controller and my IBM 20G Deskstar ATA/66 hard disk.
I've never had any problems until I upgraded to the P3/800 CPU. This required downloading and installing the new ABIT BIOS (TH) and the new HPT366 drivers. My troubles begain then. The system would work but the hard disk would run super slow. After trying everything, I solved the problem by moving the soundcard (MX300) from PCI slot 4 to slot 2 (and disabling one of the onboard IDE controllers).
Apparently, this ABIT board is very sensitive to PCI card locations. So, it's very important to check IRQ sharing, making sure that the HPT366 controller does not share any IRQs. Once I got that resolved, the board worked with no problems.
The great things about this board are the documentation, very easy overclocking without messing with jumpers, and the ability to run a wide range of slot 1 cpus (From P3/450 to P3/800). The HPT366 contoller can be a very *major* problem if you pick the wrong brand of Hard disk or happen to install your other PCI boards in a way that shares IRQs with the HPT366 controller.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
bnlitin
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Location: San Jose, CA
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 3 members
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