Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001
by Mike Andrawes on August 24, 2001 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
ABIT VP6
ABIT VP6 |
|
CPU
Interface
|
Socket-370
|
Chipset
|
VIA
Apollo Pro133A
VT 694X North Bridge VT 686B South Bridge |
Form
Factor
|
ATX
|
Bus
Speeds
|
66 - 178MHz (in 1MHz increments) |
Voltages
Supported
|
Auto
Detect |
Memory
Slots
|
4
168-pin DIMM Slots
|
Expansion
Slots
|
1
AGP Slot |
On-board
Audio
|
N/A
|
BIOS
|
Award Modular BIOS 6.00PG |
Overclocking has been the key to ABIT's success, going back to the introduction of SoftMenu seemingly eons ago. That trend continues today with all their products, including the VP6. Accordingly, within the BIOS you can find a wide variety of memory and voltage tweaking options.
Memory tweaking options.
The big overclocking feature, however, is availability of 1MHz increments for the FSB, something we hardly saw in any other dual Socket-370 motherboard. This setting allows you to fine-tune your FSB to maximize the overclocking potential of your CPU. Thanks to the clean design of the board, we were able to hit a FSB speed of 155MHz without compromising the stability of the system.
In classic ABIT fashion, you should have no problem fitting large HSF units on the motherboard since ABIT has made sure that there is plenty of space around both CPU sockets. Further, four memory slots are available, giving you added flexibility when it comes to memory configuration.
Like most other recent ABIT products, the VP6 is outfitted with the Highpoint IDE RAID controller as well. The controller allows RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1 setups. Of course, you can disable the RAID functionality and just use the controller as another IDE controller.
The Highpoint IDE RAID controller and connectors.
The only problem we encountered during testing was in the stability department, where the VP6 wasn't exactly the most stable board in the lab.
Overall, the VP6 is a board with a clear target market - the overclockers looking to dabble with SMP.. The only downside is stability, but otherwise the VP6 contains pretty much everything that a hardware enthusiasts could ask for.
2 Comments
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yelo333 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
On the Acorp 6A815EPD page, there is a misspelling:largeer
Just search for it ;)
Oh, and don't ask me why I'm actually reading such an old article :P
29a - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
I had one of these and a cool thing about it was that the CPUs didn't have to be the same speed.