Abit
BF6 motherboard review
Posted by Adam
Klein on December 20, 1999
Company:
Abit
Product: BF6
Slot 1 BX based motherboard
Abit
has been my favorite brand of motherboards for some time
now. This was mainly due to the awesome BH6 and Celeron 300
combo that I had running last year. Ever since then, I have
bought Abit motherboards.
For
my Celeron 366 I choose the Abit BX6 r2 to get me to 550MHz
and it worked flawlessly. Later on, I got the P3 450 and
still had the same Abit BX6 r2 motherboard. I was a little
disappointed that the BX6 r2 couldn’t get me to 600MHz
with my 8ns RAM, so I was stuck at 558MHz.
This
was a fairly good speed for a 450MHz P3 and I was pretty
much happy with it. Then, I received the Abit BF6
motherboard directly from Abit. I was curious to see what
this motherboard could do with my RAM and CPU. I can tell
you right now that I am extremely happy with the results I
got from the board. Read on to see why.
Initial
Impressions
When
I first got the motherboard, I noticed that the memory, CPU
slot and the BX chipset were very close together.
The
BF6 contains all of the contact points on it to accommodate
the HighPoint ATA66 controller. I used a Pentium III 450 CPU
for all the testing, however I have an Alpha P3125
cooler installed on it, so it would be hard to
install the CPU with the Alpha and still use my first DIMM
slot. I still wanted to use the first DIMM slot and I also
wanted to use the Alpha P3125 cooler, so I was in a bit of a
dilemma.
I
went our to my local hardware store and picked up a hacksaw,
some sandpaper and some heavy-duty clippers. The bottom of
the Alpha was clear, but the second row was in the way. I
took the saw and made the second level of the Alpha fins as
level as the bottom. Once I got the second level of fins cut
to the same width as the bottom level, I sanded it to make
sure it was smooth and that no stray piece of metal could
come off.
Once
I had the Alpha and DIMM problem taken care of, I was ready
to plug in all of my other hardware and power on. I wanted
to use the same installation of Win98 that I had used with
my previous motherboard, however the BX6r2 has a completely
different way to gather resources for Win98, so I knew I had
to tweak things a bit in Win98 in order to configure the
different resource settings for the BF6.
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