BE6 Specifications

Features

Intel 440 BX AGPset chipset

ATX Form Factor

ACPI compliant

AGP 1x/2x devices

3 DIMM slots, up to 768MB

SoftMenu II

Ultra ATA-66 controller, up to 4 Ultra ATA-66 devices

Ultra ATA-33 support, up to 4 Ultra ATA-33 devices

One AGP slot, 5 PCI, and 2 ISA

Keyboard and mouse power on

2 serial ports, 1 parallel port

2 USB ports

Thermal Sensor

The colors! The colors!

Like the BP6, the BE6 is also PC99 Compliant. Well, it's almost PC99. The BE6 still has 2 ISA slots, but PC99 calls for all PCI/AGP slots. You still get the cool pastel colored I/O ports. It was nice of Intel and Microsoft to specify different colored I/O ports for us mindless end-users. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to connect a serial mouse to the parallel port, but now I just look for the teal and I'm good to go.

The colorful backpanel

The snake-like thermistor

While rummaging through the cabling, we encountered the usual 40-pin IDE and floppy cables. We also found an 80-pin IDE cable and a strange little black wire with a power connector at one end. Our first reaction was "wow, there's a thermistor!" You attach the thermistor to a header on the motherboard, and you can use it the measuring tip to monitor the temperature of your CPU. Once you attach the thermistor to the CPU heatsink as close to the core as possible, you can monitor the temperature from the BIOS or with the Winbond Hardware Doctor Utility.