Design:
After taking a look at the design of the ZM6 I can’t really see anything that Abit
could have done better. In the BH6 review I wrote that the placing of the ATX power
connector could have been better, because the cable would obstruct the airflow to the CPU,
but since the PPGA Celeron is much smaller this isn’t really a problem on the ZM6.
A feature of the ZM6 that I’ve never seen on any other ZX based motherboard is the
inclusion of full 2/5/1 slot-setup (ie 2 ISA, 5 PCI and 1 AGP slots). What makes this so
special is the fact that the ZX chipset only offers 4 PCI bus master signals, but Abit
still added 5 PCI slots, why? And how?
They did this because many PCI add-on cards don’t require a bus master signal. The
Voodoo(2) series doesn’t, many network interface cards doesn’t and alot of VGA
cards doesn’t either. This is in my humble opinion a great feature of the ZM6,
because you can never have too many PCI slots.
Another quite unique feature of the ZM6 is that it has 3 DIMM slots, even though the ZX
chipset only has support for 4 memory rows (2 double-sided DIMMs). This leaves you with
the ability to add 2 single sided DIMMs and one Double sided or 3 single sided, thus
offering greater expandability and flexibility.
