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Fan Headers
ABIT also rearranged the position of the fan headers. Previously in the BE6, one of the fan headers was
placed behind the CPU slot which meant that the power
cable for the fan must pass above the processor card and
(and depending on the cooler) in front of the cooler.
Due to the short length of many cooler power cables,
the placement of the BE6's fan header may mean that the
power cable will come into contact with the hot surfaces
of the processor card and heatsink. Of course, if your
processor is adequately cooled, this will not pose a
problem. In addition, users using larger coolers (but
short power cables) may find it difficult to attach the
cable to the fan header since it will have to run
backwards over the cooler and processor card to the fan
header.
A better solution (if you are using a
cooler with two fans) would be to place the fan headers
somewhere in front of the processor card. That's what ABIT
did in the BF6. As you can see above, they have positioned two of the fan headers
(boxed in red) on the
upper part of the motherboard, right next to the DIMM slots. This allows for
the easier installation of coolers with two fans (and two separate power
cables).
However, if you are using a cooler that cools both the front and rear of
the processor card or if you have adapted two coolers to work in a similar
fashion, the old BE6 placement of the fan headers would be a better
solution.
The third fan header was moved a little lower and placed right next to
the single ISA slot on the motherboard. As you can see above, it's situated
at the edge of the board between the ISA slot and the 3V battery.
Hardware Monitoring
Rather than use the stripped-down Winbond W83783S
hardware monitoring chip found in the BE6 and popular with
many motherboards, ABIT chose to go with the full featured
Winbond W83782D chip (picture above) instead. So,
users of the ABIT BF6 will now be able to monitor a
total of 3 temperatures, 2 fan speeds and 9 voltages.
Just like the BE6-II, the BF6 also comes with a 10kΩ thermal probe
or thermistor (shown above) attached to a flexible
cable which allows the user to monitor the temperature of anything within
40cm of the motherboard's TSYS2 header (shown below
boxed in red).
But unlike the BE6, the header has now been moved to
left side of the AGP slot. This is a far better position
than the header's position in the BE6 (between the ends of
the last two PCI slots) because it allows the thermistor
to comfortably reach practically every component hooked to
the motherboard. It is also somewhat more accessible than
in the BE6.
Expandability
Although ABIT 440BX motherboards have always had 1 AGP
slot, 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots, ABIT broke with its own
conventions this time and relieved the BF6 of one of its
ISA slots. That means that you, the user, will only have
one ISA slot to play with.
This really isn't a problem as practically everyone (or
at least the market segment that ABIT is targeting) will
have dumped his/her ISA cards a long time ago. So, the
sole ISA slot is basically only for the few who :
- just can't part with their ISA cards :)
- have ISA cards that they absolutely need and aren't
available in the PCI flavour (???)
On the other hand, ABIT added another PCI slot but I
guess they did that to differentiate the BF6 from the BE6-II.
Otherwise, there would be little to differentiate the BF6
from the BE6-II, other than the lack of UltraDMA 66
support. Anyway, this means that the BF6 has a total of
six PCI slots, a step closer towards PC99 compliance. Just
note some facts about PCI slot usage in the BF6 :-
- The first PCI slot and the AGP slot share IRQ
signals so if you have devices in both slots, you
should only install devices that support IRQ sharing.
The same goes for PCI slots 2 and 5; and PCI slots 3 and 6.
- PCI slot 4 shares IRQ signals with the USB
controller. Unless you are not using the USB
controller, you should only install PCI devices that
support IRQ sharing in PCI slot 4.
- The last PCI slot (slot 6) is a full bus slave. That
means you can't install a bus mastering PCI card here.
This is not unlike the situation with the last PCI
slot (PCI slot 5) in the BE6-II, where that PCI slot
is a bus-master capable slot but cannot support bus
mastering PCI cards because it shares the bus master
signal with the HPT366 controller.
Now, those rules above may sound complicated but you
don't really have to worry about them because most, if not
all, of the latest PCI cards support IRQ sharing and PCI
devices like some low-end graphics cards and some LAN
cards do not need bus-mastering support and can therefore
be used in PCI slot 6.
So, you should not encounter any problem using PCI
devices with the BF6. The rules above are only to help the
occasional unfortunate user troubleshoot when he/she has a
PCI card combination that doesn't work properly. The most
important tip, I say, would be to avoid using the last PCI
slot if possible and then only with a PCI device that does
not need bus-mastering support.
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