Intel 440BX 133MHz Motherboard Roundup (June 2000)

The Candidates

We rounded up a total of seven BX motherboards for this roundup: the ABIT BF6, ABIT BE6-II, AOpen AX6BXC Pro Gold, ASUS CUBX, Gigabyte GA-6BX7+, Microstar BXMaster, and the Soyo SY-6BA+IV.

The first thing we noticed after running through all of the benchmarks and stability tests was that, overall, each one of the seven boards performed just about equally in terms of stability when running at 133MHz. 

No board crashed more than three times during a 24-hour looped run of Content Creation Winstone 2000.  This is compared to the 6+ times that most average Apollo Pro 133A and VIA KX133 motherboards crash during the same 24-hour period.  The BX platform is definitely very refined, and even when overclocked, provided that you have properly selected your components (PCI cards don't really matter since you can run your PCI bus at 133MHz / 4 which keeps them in spec at 33MHz), your BX133 platform should be just as stable as any other 133MHz platform out there. 

The highest we could push any of these boards reliably was around the 155MHz FSB.  The Soyo SY-6BA+IV was one of the only boards to run our 733MHz test chip at 155MHz x 5.5 reliably, even while running 3D games and applications.  But at 155MHz x 5.5, there was a noticeable drop in stability when compared to the SY-6BA+IV at the 133MHz setting.  We could've probably pushed the board even higher, but it lacked the FSB settings to go any higher.  Before you start asking, our ABIT BF6 was only able to get to around 150MHz before our benchmarks would no longer run reliably, so the 1MHz FSB increments above 150MHz weren't of much use.  We tested this using Micron –7E SDRAM, which is rated at 133MHz CAS2 and is the only currently available PC133 SDRAM capable of running at 133MHz CAS2. 

Another issue we encountered was that on the ASUS CUBX, the CMD controller that provides for Ultra DMA 66 functionality required that we manually enable the Ultra DMA 66 setting, in spite of the fact that we were using Ultra DMA 66 drives and cables. 

Regarding all of the boards that feature external Ultra DMA 66 controllers, if the drivers for those controllers were not installed properly or at all from the start, we noticed very erratic behavior under Windows often resulting in random lockups and failures to boot Windows properly, so make sure you get those drivers installed. 

The HighPoint controller on the ABIT and Soyo motherboards was the only Ultra DMA 66 controller to come up as two devices under the SCSI devices section of Windows' Device Manager.  At the same time, the CMD controller on the ASUS CUBX was the only controller to come up properly as an IDE controller.  Those are just some of the odd quirks about working with these boards.