One gripe we've got with the BF6 is its ATX power connector. Abit, like many mainboard manufacturers, places the ATX power supply connector on the opposite side of the CPU's Slot-1 mount, which isn't our favorite place for it to be as it makes swapping out CPUs a little bit of a hassle.

The BF6 makes up for the ATX power connector problem by offering very clear diagrams and legible text on the board itself. Very handy should a user misplace the board's manual.

The manual that the BF6 ships with is small in size, but packed with good information. While it doesn't reinvent the wheel as far as manuals go, it does adequately describe and illustrate the various installation procedures and options that the BF6 offers.

Knowing that 440BX chipsets tend to perform very similarly to each other it was no surprise that the BF6 placed almost right on top of the BE6-II in our system level benchmarks.

You'd be right to assume that after six or seven 440BX mainboards Abit would have the drill down as far as performance goes, and the BF6 lives up to this preconception. It was stable, performed well, and even correctly detected peripherals that require an IRQ setting from its sixth PCI slot.

Utilizing EMS' HSDRAM, which is rated to operate at a maximum front side bus speed of 150MHz, we were able to achieve an FSB speed of 144MHz while using an unlocked Intel Coppermine Pentium III CPU on the BF6.

That's a 2MHz improvement versus the BE6-II board we tested two months ago (has it been that long? Time flies when you're endlessly benchmarking…)

As we mentioned previously, since the 440BX chipset only contains a divider for the AGP bus that equals 66% of the FSB speed (2/3), using a TNT2 or other AGP 2X video card at FSB speeds beyond 133MHz with it is out of the question.

At 144MHz, the AGP bus is forced to run at 95MHz, which is well beyond the stock 66MHz level that its specifications call for.