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 ABIT BH6   
You asked for it, we made it
(Review by MS)


ABIT, a leading Taiwanese manufacturer of computer parts never had to hide from a comparison of their products with other brands. A few months back when the battle over the Socket 7 market was still raging at full blow, ABIT had two of the top contenders for the position of the best Motherboard, the TX5 and the TX5N, paralleled in performance and stability only by a few other boards like the PA 2007 (FIC), HOT603 and HOT569 (Shuttle) and TX97 (E) (ASUS). With Intel’s Pentium II processor gaining more market shares ABIT quickly adjusted to the newer Slot1 architecture and came up with the LX6 board which, for a short period of time was the undisputed board of choice in the Slot1 category. The introduction of the BX chipset changed the story again but ABIT was still able to maintain a solid position in the ever growing field of BX competitors.


Still, there was not a perfect board out there, meaning something that you can stick any Slot1 processor into without having to worry about proper recognition of the CPU paired with top performance. Such a board would include a soft menu that automatically finds the different types of Slot1 processors based on either the Mendocino or Deshutes design with all their derivatives currently on the market. In addition, one would like to see some features that override the limitations by Intel for overclocking, that is the Pin-21 signal that determines whether the processor receives a bus signal for 100 MHz or 66 MHz, respectively and limit the clock multipliers accordingly in order to prevent overclocking.
In other words, the board should have some BIOS features that make the routine of taping or painting the infamous Pin-21 obsolete. Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, Intel has done some further modifications on their clock locking devices, so that the BIOS settings for "signal low" or "signal high" are useful only for CPUs manufactured before August 1998. Still there are quite a few older Pentium II out there the owners of which will profit from a "Softmenu" driven signal selection. In addition the perfect board should be easy enough to set up for even a completely inexperienced user, without fiddling around with jumpers and opening the case every time something new has to be tried or went wrong.

Other wishes include 5 PCI slots, AGP (of course) and, most importantly, a safety feature for recovery of the default settings. This is extremely important since a soft menu requires an operational computer in order to change the settings. If you ever tried to run CAS-3 DIMMs on a CAS-2 setting with the result that the machine wouldn’t even boot and you had no jumpers to reverse the setting or, to that effect, lower the bus speed, you know what I am talking about. The only way out of this dilemma is often enough to clear the CMOS and thus, a feature that automatically recognizes some setting related malfunction and corrects it by returning to the default values is high on the wish list of everyone who likes to play around and push the system to its limits.

So does the BH6 hold what the slogan promises?

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