Abit VP6 Motherboard Review

Posted: 2/5/2001
Written by: MotoŽ
Price: $175.00 (Low price here)
Supplied by: Abit

The Abit VP6 is a dual CPU ATX board that uses VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset with dual processor support. The VP6 features two FC-PGA sockets that support 66/100/133Mhz system bus speeds. It also supports Ultra DMA 100 and RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 with a High Point HTP370 IDE Controller. It offers 5 PCI, 4 DIMM, and a 4x AGP slot.

The Abit VP6 is Abit's long-awaited follow-up to the old BP6 board, which pretty much brought low-cost SMP to gamers. While the BP6 was based on Intel's all-mighty 440BX chipset, Abit decided to go another way and use the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset for the follow-up. A wise choice it was too. The VP6 not only has all the features one can ask for in a high performance motherboard, it also has the features we don't want. You will not find a modem riser slot of any ISA slots on this board. No sir! What you will find is nothing but the good stuff. Five PCI slots, support for ATA100, built in RAID support and four DIMM slots so you can pack over two gigs of RAM if your heart desires.

Among the unique features found in the VP6 is the RAID controller which allows you to hook up to four drives in striped, mirrored, or a combination of both. For maximum hard drive performance you would stripe your drives in a RAID 0 setup. The performance gain is really amazing. Striping two IBM 7200 RPM ATA100 drives gives higher performance than a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive.

Overclocking has always been Abit's number one selling features and the VP6 doesn't disappoint. You have options for the normal 66, 100 and 133MHz processors. However, Abit's Softmenu III allows you to adjust the front side bus from 66Mhz all the way to 178Mhz in 1Mhz steps! This is not as great as the 66Mhz to 200Mhz  in 1Mhz steps as the old BX133-RAID but, unlike the BX133, you can make use of the higher bus speeds because of the 1/2 AGP divider used by the VIA chipset.

The following speeds are available from the BIOS:  66, 68, 75, 80, 83, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140, and 150MHz. Now you may be wondering how does this work out to 1Mhz steps? Well Abit let us tweak things a little more and gave us the CPU FSB Plus (MHz) setting that ranges from 0 to 28MHz.  So what does that mean?  It means you can choose any of the stock bus speeds and then add anywhere from 0 to 28MHz giving you a FSB from 66MHz to 178MHz in 1MHz increments.  In a way this is a bit better than the old set up of 1Mhz increase at a time. I remember it took awhile to go from 100 to 150Mhz in my BX133-RAID.

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