The Boards
ABit SE6
Board Revision: ?
BIOS Version: June 19, 2000
The latest ABit motherboard comes with their Soft Menu II, giving you all CPU setup and overclocking options directly in the BIOS. Lots of FSB speeds between 66 and 153 MHz are available. I'm just missing faster speeds than 153 MHz. The Asus CUSL2 and MSI's board proved that 166 MHz are no problem for the chipset. I suppose it's the clock generator, which does not support faster clock speeds. ABit is the only manfacturer that lets you select the in-order queue depth (1 or 4).
The common hardware features do not differ very much from the competitors: 6 PCI slots, CNR, UltraATA/100, AGP 4x, AC97 sound system with 3 line-ins, three DIMM sockets and 3 fan headers. Memory compatibility was quite good: All DIMMs except the HSDRAM DIMM from Mushkin worked properly. The board's design is not perfect: The lower DIMM locks interfere with the AGP card if they aren't closed and the floppy connector is placed right in front of two PCI slots. As you have four more, that should not really pose a problem. To ease this little inconvenience, a piezo speaker is already on-board and will make the system speaker obsolete.
There is not much more to say about the ABit board. It's fast, runs very stable and offers excellent overclocking features. It's a typical ABit board. Just the cables for the USB ports 3 and 4 and the COM2 cable are not supplied by default.
