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ABIT BH6 Part V The Good and Bad Since I published parts 1,2 and 3 of the BH6 review, I have been receiving a lot of emails asking different aspects of the board. I intend to summarise it here. The BH6 has 5 PCI and 3 DIMM slots as contrast to BX6 which has 4 PCI and 4 DIMM slots. During the installation of the system, I find that DIMM slots are too near to the AGP slot. This makes it difficult to install RAM once your have inserted your AGP card because the DIMM's catch cannot be opened wide enough to accomodate the SDRAM module. BH6 has a smaller footprint as compared to the BX6. This makes installation of the board easier as compared to BX6. The BH6 has a SB-link for SB compatibility. BX6 does not provide this functionality. Compatibility issues arises when I tried to use the S3 card on BX6 and BH6. Both motherboards does not seem to like old S3 ViRGE chispets. The interesting thing is that some people have no problems running S3 ViRGE/DX 375 and some has problems running it on their board. The system just hangs when you move the mouse. You will have to hard reset it. The BH6 board to my knowledge might not be as compatible as the BX6 with old PC66 SDRAMs. In my part IV of the review, I mentioned about the two Hyundai RAMs that refuse to cooperate to boot at 112 Mhz FSB. It worked fine at 112Mhz in BX6 but does not work in BH6. So, I have to rely on only the 1 x 32Mb Hyundai module to do the WinStone 98 and Wintune 98 test. The BH6 runs very cool and there is no need to boost the CPU voltage to 2.1v or 2.2v for the Celeron 266 to run at 112Mhz x 4 = 448Mhz! No compatibility issues with ISA Network cards or any ISA cards. Everything is configured thru PnP when I transferred the peripherals to the BH6. Recommendations The ABIT BH6 is a good buy as compared to BX6 as it's cheaper at US$120 and it has more options in terms of overclocking. In BH6, you would be able to tweak two additional settings. The SEL#66/100 and FSB of 124Mhz in CMOS. The BX6 does not have this setting. The other factor is that it is able to override the default setting of 2.0v for Celeron. Pushing the voltage by 0.1~0.3v is a good way to successful overclocking of your processor. Most of the PC66 and PC100 SDRAMs runs fine at stipulated speeds or even higher than the recommended speeds. e.g. PC66 runs at 112Mhz without any problems. Thanks to Abit who shield us from tweaking the memory settings. The only disappointment could be that I am unable to achieve 496 Mhz to boot into Win98 at all with PC-100 Hyundai RAM. I would like to emphasise that the SDRAM module used is not a CAS 2 nor is it certified to support 125Mhz. So that could be the problem. I will try and get my hands on a 32Mb PC-100 SDRAM that supports 125Mhz and see whether it works or not. But this will not be immediate as such SDRAM is not cheap. I could probably pay the same price to get double the amount of RAM :-) The BH6 suffers some incompatibilities with some peripherals e.g. the S3 and SiS based AGP cards. Other than that, I seriously recommend the ABIT BH6 as the champion overclocking board of 1998 ! For more information on ABIT BH6, please check out http://www.abit.com.tw
13 September 1998 11:33 AM |
