Abit's SE6 and BX133-RAID
The Intel PC133 BX versus i815 - Where the rubber meets the road.

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
7/30/00

Hot Hardware's Test Systems One driven by the ol' BX and the other by the new kid on the block, the i815.

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 933EB,  Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard and Abit BX133-RAID i440BX Motherboard, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), Dual IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drives (thanks again Outside Loop), Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS AGP Graphics Card , Kenwood 72X CDROM, Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a

Head-to-Head / Performance Progression Where the rubber meets the road... BX versus i815

Driver maturity and an over-clocked AGP bus allow the BX133 to take the lead in the lower resolutions.  However, take a look at the 1024X768 scores and you'll notice things level out quite a bit as we reach the GeForce 2's fill rate.  In any event, these are excellent scores from both the SE6 and BX133-RAID.  The SE6 handily beats most every VIA based board we have tested to date.  Again, you need to remember that our particular graphics card ran solid in the BX133-RAID with a heavily over-clocked AGP Bus Speed of 87.8 MHz. (133MHz. with 2/3 divider).  Most cards should run at this speed but it definitely accounts for the higher scores at lower resolutions with the BX133-RAID.

Well, we've covered just about every aspect of the Abit BX133-RAID and SE6 Motherboards, for you here today.  Both of these boards have a great list of features.  The BX133-RAID would have been near perfection if it only had 1 more PCI slot for a total of 6 like its SE6 counterpart.  The SE6 has a few quirks that are dismissible like the location of the ATX Power Connector etc.  Performance with respect to both Abit products is top notch.  However, we hope that with time and maturity, the i815 chipset will improve to new levels that will leave the aging BX chipset behind for good. 

Finally, you've seen the power and performance that RAID technology can breath into a mature product like the BX chipset.  In RAID 0 mode, drive performance was nothing but jaw dropping for us and we are hard pressed to go back to anything less now that we have tasted this kind of speed.

We're giving the Abit BX133-RAID a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of...

Worthy of our highest praise, the BX133-RAID also gets our Editor's Choice Award!

We'll award the Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of...

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