Introduction

By now all of you out there in overclocker land should know the name ABIT by now and some of you during your overclocking days most likely would have used an ABIT board but if you have been living on another planet and don't know who ABIT are here is a quick run down.

ABIT is one of Taiwan's largest motherboard suppliers. Although you won't find many of their boards in computers like DELL, Compaq or IBM you will find them in just about every overclocked system. ABIT stated it overclockers run way back in the days of the old LX chipset with the innovative BIOS jumper system or Softmenu II as ABIT call it. When Intel's power packed chipset known as the BX (82443BX to give its reference name) was released ABIT took advantage of this by making some very nifty overclockers motherboards. The first real success story for ABIT was the BH6 and BX6. Both were designed on the 440BX chipset and featured ABit's Softmenu II software jumper system making it easy for anyone to overclock the CPU in the BIOS system, CPU multiplier, core voltage and even I/O voltage was changeable in BIOS, this was a super idea for before the days of the jumperless setup if you wanted to overclock you had to take of the cover, get your user manual out, locate the jumpers and try and set them to the right settings without loosing the jumper caps inside the PC, I can tell you all it can be quite a nightmare when you keep dropping them. The success of the BX chipset meant success for ABIT with 10 very good quality motherboards. When ATA-66 came out ABIT were the very first company to add an onboard ATA-66 controller to the BX motherboards, ABIT BE6 for slot 1 and BP6 for dual socket 370. This proved to be a good selling point for ABIT as now you could add up to 8 IDE devices to your motherboard. When Intel released the I8xx series chipset the BX sat in the backbench for ABIT until now. ABIT have release a new motherboard based once again on the famous BX Chipset with ATA-100 IDE controller with built in RAID capabilities. Again we were kindly donated this board for testing and once again TweakTown asks "Does this board deserve to be called ABIT"?