Manufacturer Chaintech 
Retail Price $115 

Expansion Slot : 4/3/1 

The 6BTM’s Award BIOS features a jumperless CPU setup known, in keeping with the grand tradition of innovative nomenclature in the computer industry, as the SeePU setup configuration. The name aside, this is actually quite a useful feature, allowing you to choose from some pre-defined CPU settings, select the bus speed from the supplied 66-133MHz or select 2.0x-5.0x clock multiplier settings. Back when the board came out, the SeePU setup wouldn’t allow bus speeds above 83MHz for 66MHz Pentium II or Celeron processors, but Chaintech fixed this without much delay, removing what was more or less the only major obstacle in the way of this board’s rise to the top levels of competition. While on the subject of the BIOS, the 6BTM’s Trend ChipAway virus protection feature also deserves mention. This does not replace traditional antivirus software, but prevents any boot sector viruses from activating prior to the boot process.
 

As motherboards go, Chaintech’s 6BTM is a mature, stable board and a natural choice for a roundup of this nature. As you can see above, it has most everything you could want in the list of features- from keyboard power on to the various wake-up modes. Chaintech has opted for the older 4/3/1 expansion slot rather than having 5 PCI slots. This isn’t really a shortcoming as such, since 4 PCI slots is usually enough for most users and there are still many users who would appreciate the extra ISA slot.  Note that there are four DIMM slots rather than three.

 

The board ran very well with CAS-3 PC100 SDRAM at 112MHz, so you don’t have to worry about stability. Even when overclocking, this is a very stable board. No compatibility problems arose during testing either. The 6BTM is clearly a winner for Chaintech. This is a rock-solid, quality board, and very overclocker-friendly, even more so since the BIOS update to the SeePU setup configuration. As if that weren’t enough, the list of features is quite extensive, making the 6BTM a very attractive choice...but we mustn’t get into that yet, since we’re only halfway through the long list. Onward!