Mainboard manufacturer's instructional manuals have gotten better and better each year in the 90s, and the BE6's manual is very well laid out and easy to understand.

A disturbing trend we're beginning to see from some mainboard vendors lately is the elimination of the printed instruction manual in favor of one that's equipped only on an included CD. This begs the question of what the buyer does if they can't get their PC to power up once they've installed the new board…Luckily this isn't the case with the BE6 as the printed manual will be included with each of the boards in the box.

Installing the BE6 was very straightforward and intuitive. Abit has mounted the additional set of UDMA 66 channels on top of the standard set, which is very ergonomically sound. The ATX power connector is still placed on the opposite side of the slot-1 CPU socket, which is a mediocre choice in our opinion. We'd rather see the ATX connector lying perpendicular to the Slot-1 connector right above the DIMM sockets. This way the power cable runs a very short distance and doesn't block a user from adding/removing their CPU quickly as it does currently.

Other than that small gripe the BE6's layout is very well thought out and clearly shows the knowledge that Abit has gained by putting so many 440BX boards on the market previously.

Very consistent, the BE6 again demonstrates how identical from chip to chip the 440BX controller set really is. In our system-level benchmarks the BE6 placed near the top of the large group, in fact it ironically seated itself at the next peg down from the Abit BX6 R2 board we tested two months ago.

Almost all 440BX-based mainboards perform within the same 3% margin, it's been rare in our experience to find one that operates at a speed that's far from the majority of boards available.