I've been a long time user and advocate of the BX chipset but after playing with an Abit SE6 for the past week I would have to say it would be a very dumb move to buy a BX board at this time unless you run a Celeron or something or are just plain broke.
I don't care what anybody says, AGP cards don't run 100% stable on highly overclocked AGP ports. I've run quite a few different cards on 140+ MHz FBS systems and there's always the odd glitch here or there that difficult to pin down because you don't know if it's the OC'ed bus or something else. Speaking of isolating problems with overclocking, the I815's ability to run the memory bus at 100 or 133MHz is great for troubleshooting memory induced overclocking failures. I never knew exactly why my 550E hit the wall at 140MHz on my BF6, choosing the "3" memory timing option on the SE6 allows the processor to run at 150MHz totally stable, of course performance is compromised with the slow memory bus but now I know installing faster memory, not a faster processor is the way to get better performance.
BX boards need some kind of add on controller to make full use of ATA/66 hard drives, these controllers are somewhat buggy and add something else to the loop to check when you're system is failing. The ICH2 controller works great with a $100 15G IBM GXP75 ATA/100 hard drive, much faster than when hooked to a ATA/66 Hi Point controller. There's more good without anything bad that I can think about except the board was relatively expensive, I've even got this board beating my BX 3DMark scores now(clock for clock), so much for the poor performance reports, - just my take on the subject - M.
I don't care what anybody says, AGP cards don't run 100% stable on highly overclocked AGP ports. I've run quite a few different cards on 140+ MHz FBS systems and there's always the odd glitch here or there that difficult to pin down because you don't know if it's the OC'ed bus or something else. Speaking of isolating problems with overclocking, the I815's ability to run the memory bus at 100 or 133MHz is great for troubleshooting memory induced overclocking failures. I never knew exactly why my 550E hit the wall at 140MHz on my BF6, choosing the "3" memory timing option on the SE6 allows the processor to run at 150MHz totally stable, of course performance is compromised with the slow memory bus but now I know installing faster memory, not a faster processor is the way to get better performance.
BX boards need some kind of add on controller to make full use of ATA/66 hard drives, these controllers are somewhat buggy and add something else to the loop to check when you're system is failing. The ICH2 controller works great with a $100 15G IBM GXP75 ATA/100 hard drive, much faster than when hooked to a ATA/66 Hi Point controller. There's more good without anything bad that I can think about except the board was relatively expensive, I've even got this board beating my BX 3DMark scores now(clock for clock), so much for the poor performance reports, - just my take on the subject - M.
