Let's start at the top with the AX6BC's installation and instruction manual.

Sporting a small ATX form factor size and some of the best peripheral connector placements we've seen, the AX6BC began to impress us as soon as we removed it from its shipping container. Our favorable feelings continued as we flipped through the small yet information packed manual that's included with the AX6BC, it detailed every possible BIOS setting and their functions.

After connecting the various cables, and power cords to the new board, we installed five PCI peripherals to test its maximum automatic configurability. Sharp readers know that Intel's PCI spec calls for a maximum of just four PCI slots per mainboard. Clever mainboard manufacturers have gotten around this limitation, but the results aren't always 100% perfect. For example, when the Abit BH6 is put through this same test, it often times fails to correctly identify and assign the IRQ for whatever card is located in its fifth slot. Needless to say, this is an annoying occurrence as the user has to continually reboot and adjust the PCI settings in BIOS in order to get the BH6 to function properly with all of its PCI slots filled.

The AX6BC on the other hand just nailed this test, and even correctly configured the Adaptec UW2940 SCSI controller we threw at it (usually a tough one for auto config BIOSes). For your own reference, these are the five peripherals we used to fill up and try and confuse the AX6BC with:

· Quantum3D X-24 Voodoo2 SLI PCI Card
· Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI PCI Controller Card
· RealMagic Hollywood Plus MPEG-2/DVD PCI Decoder Card
· Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live PCI Audio Card
· Diamond SupraMax PCI v.90 modem

Thanks to the jumperless setup, overclocking a CPU on the AX6BC seemed like a natural. To test it, we pulled out an ancient (made in March of 98) P2-350 CPU whose overclocking limits are known to us like the Mossad knows professional ladies tennis (he's a BIG fan of Monica Seles…something about the grunting).

We knew this particular CPU was good to go all the way to 400MHz (3.0 x 133MHz) with proper cooling, so it would serve as a good judge of the AX6BC's ability to boost speeds efficiently.