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Although beset by competitors for the last few years, the Intel BX chipset continues to make its way into many new motherboards. The reason for this is simple; the Intel BX offers the best pure performance with a 100MHz FSB or when overclocked of any motherboard chipset, period. Although it is somewhat lacking in the features department, the promise of exceptional performance has caused many to seek out BX motherboards for their high-end systems.
This search has been aided by several motherboard vendors, who offer revision after revision of their venerable BX motherboards and sometimes go so far as to weld on features that the basic BX chipset does not support. Micro-Star did this quite successfully with their MS-6163 line of motherboards. First came the MS-6163, then the MS-6163Pro and finally completed their run with the exceptional BXMaster. Soyo has also been quite the same thing with their SY-6BA+ motherboard line, and went through several revisions up to their current SY-6BA+ 100. Each of these revisions added new features such as ATA-66 and/or ATA-100, extended CPU support, and did just about everything possible to advance the motherboard features list while maintaining the performance inherent with the Intel BX chipset.
Not surprisingly, ABIT has also been on the forefront of BX motherboard technology and enhancement. Their extremely popular BH6 and BX6 motherboards opened quite a few doors for the company, and they featured one of the first highly stable soft-BIOS setups, which helped change the way we overclock our CPUs. ABIT also produced what I feel is one of the better BX motherboards ever, the BX6 revision 2. This board had just about everything a performance freak would want and it occupied an honored place in my test rig for quite some time.
One of the factors that caused the BX6R2 to start getting a little long in the tooth was the advent of ATA-66 and the growth of alternative chipsets that directly supported it. Benchmarking a standard BX motherboard against some of the newer competitors from VIA Technology was not a valid comparison, especially given the impact hard drive performance can have. Motherboard manufacturers solved this limitation by adding dedicated Promise or HighPoint ATA-66 controllers onto their products, thereby giving the BX chipset a bit more life. ABIT themselves produced several boards with ATA-66 controllers, such as the BP6, BE6, and BE6-II. All proved to be extremely popular with the performance crowd and they just served as another reminder of the consistent lure of the BX chipset.
In yet another enhancement of the BX chipset, ABIT has released the BX133-RAID motherboard, and it incorporates a few improvements over their existing line-up. Compared to previous ABIT BX motherboards, the enhancements of the BX133-RAID are pretty radical, starting with a HighPoint HPT370 ATA-100 RAID controller right on-board. This allows the board to support the emerging ATA-100 standard, as well as offering enhanced RAID striping and mirroring capabilities. The BX133-RAID is also designed around the FC-PGA format, making it something of an anomaly in the high-end BX marketplace. ABIT has produced two other Socket 370 motherboards, the BM6 and the dual-CPU BP6, but they were both based on the older PPGA format used with the early Celerons. In fact, I do not know of any other name brand motherboard that offers the feature set of the BX133-RAID in a FC-PGA package. Overall, the BX133-RAID looks to be a worthy successor to ABIT's proud BX heritage.