Abit VP6 Motherboard Review

I tested the VP6 with the following:

• AMK 292-3333 ATX case with 300 watt PS
• Two Intel P3-700
• Four sticks 256 Meg PC-133 SDRAM
• Two IBM 30 Gig ATA100 drives in RAID 0
• Creative GeForce 2 Ultra
• Phillip Acoustic Edge 5.1 sound card
• D Link 10/100 NIC
• Windows 2000 Professional

Abit motherboards has always been about overclocking and the VP6 is no exception. With 1Mhz steps in front side bus speed from 66 to 178Mhz, a user can truly find the limits of his CPUs. There is one gripe about Abit's new soft menu however; voltage adjustment.

The original BP6 let the user adjust the voltage of each of the two CPU. The new VP6 does not. Why it's like that is beyond me. The two P3-700 I have will both do 1000Mhz but one requires 1.75V and the other requires 1.85V. What the VP6 will do is give both CPUs 1.85V because I can't adjust voltage for the two CPUs independent of each other and I can't run both CPU at 1.75V because one of them needs more juice to be stable. So now I have one CPU getting the voltage it wants and one CPU getting more than it needs.

Having said all that,  I have to say that the VP6 is one super stable motherboard when it comes to overclocking. My only one complaint was it not letting me set voltage for each CPU individually. I just don't like the idea of running a CPU with any more voltage than it needs. 

With nothing more than an increase in voltage to 1.85V, I had my two 700Mhz P3's running on a 143Mhz bus for dual 1001Mhz! Abit includes Windows software that will let you monitor the CPU temp as read from those probes direct under each processors.

Even filling up all four DIMM slots with two different types of RAM didn't upset the salability of the Abit motherboard. This is truly a job well done. Being that the VP6 uses the VIA 133A chipset, you don't have to worry about stressing your AGP and PCI devices. At the 143Mhz front side bus, your AGP bus is running at 71.5Mhz and the PCI bus is running at 35.75Mhz. This is just a bit over stock and should be no problem for any AGP or PCI device.

Next page: Benchmark

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