Abit VP6 Motherboard Review

Benchmark numbers in SiSoft's synthetic CPU/FPU benchmarks are about spot on to what you'd see in a "real" dual P3-1ghz system. Considering how cheaply you can pick up a P3-700 for, this is a great way to get a killer dual setup. The multimedia benchmarks shows similar results, which is what you would expected.

The beauty of the Via 133a chipset is you can run memory speed independent of Front Side Bus speed. This is very important as VIA chipset has pretty poor memory performance. However, Abit toss in a bunch of additional memory tweaks like 4 way interleaving to really improve the memory performance. It's still not as good as it could be but it's way better than what the VIA chipsets were doing when they first came out.

Hard drive performance was outstanding, with a score of nearly 20,000. The VP6 uses the same controller as the my Abit KT7-RAID and it took full advantage of the 30 Gig IBM ATA 100 hard drive. Performance numbers were pretty much the same as what the KT7-RAID did since they are the same setup. Most people would be happy with this level of drive speed. For those who want more, the Abit motherboard has a built in RAID controller, allowing you to add more hard drives for increase performance or security.

To test the RAID feature, I remove the twin IBM 30 Gig ATA100 drive from the KT7-RAID system which were stripped in a RAID 0 setup. This makes the two 30 Gig drives into one 60 Gig drive. Half the data is stored in one drive and the other half is stored into the second drive. Data is "striped" off both drives at the same time, effectively doubling hard drive speed. I'm happy to report that I didn't have to reset up the RAID or reformat the drive. Since both the VP6 and KT7-RAID use the same RAID controller, the VP6 knew the two drives were striped. This sure did save me a lot of time. I still formatted the C drive and re-install the OS however.  As good as the performance is from a single drive, it kinda pales in comparison to two IBM ATA100 drives in a RAID 0 setup, with a benchmark score of 36,838.

Next page: Conclusion

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