From the list of features Abit offers with the BE6 it's clear that they want buyers to understand that they're offering some of Intel's future technology today.

For example, the freshly supported UltraDMA/66 protocol support for hard drives, which made its debut in the form of the limited Intel i810 integrated mainboard core logic set last month, is offered and supported on the Abit BE6.

Since the 440BX chipset doesn't include native support for UDMA 66 (it offers UDMA 33 support) Abit turned to third party semiconductor designer HighPoint Technology for a solution.

HighPoint's HPT366 UltraDMA/66 controller chip was selected by Abit, and is currently mounted on all BE6 mainboards along with two additional UDMA ports.

Sharky Extreme readers good at math have already made the assumption by now that the BE6 can therefore handle up to eight independent UDMA hard drives from a total of four channels.

They would be correct.

Since the HPT366 controller acts just like most integrated SCSI controllers on mainboards do, it doesn't draw on the 440BX for any resources.

Even though it's likely not necessary, thanks to the two UDMA 33 channels provided by the 440BX, the HPT366 UDMA 66 controller offers backwards compatibility for older hard drives that support only UltraDMA/33.

Other features that the specification sheet lists that bear mentioning here are the three SDRAM DIMM sockets which house a maximum of 768MB of SDRAM and the inclusion of two ISA slots on the BE6.

The inclusion of ISA slots on the BE6 is more surprising than you'd think, it wasn't long ago that most mainboard manufacturers were eschewing the use of the slow transfer ISA bus in favor of opting for a 6th PCI slot in future board designs. MSI's MS-6153 440BX mainboard is a good example of this as it offers no ISA support but does offer a total of six PCI slots.

One final feature with the BE6 that we find both practical and appropriate considering Abit's veteran CPU overclocking audience is the inclusion of a very thin themal sensor cable. The cable connects to an open set of pins on the BE6 very easily and then reports back to the BIOS or Win98 software the temperature reading of whatever it's pressed against. The thermal sensor proved itself to be almost as accurate as Sharky Extreme's $850 professional themal measurement gear, generating results that were within 2% of our advanced probe's readings.