Introduction

The ABIT die-hards amongst you will recall the BP6 range of motherboards that allowed us to have Dual Celeron processors enabling us to obtain the extra edge in performance that we all craved for.

The BP6 was a huge success but had its life span prematurely severed by Intel tweaking the design and removing support for all Celerons working in Dual mode. This was a rather strange move on their part considering the Duron was only around the corner. ABIT in the last six months has released some of the finest range of Motherboards for the AMD platform, in particular the ABIT KT7-Raid topping all records know to man, with many retailers reporting the best figures for Motherboard sales ever based on the AMD range of processors. ABIT just had to replicate this on the Intel platform, they have done so in the form of the VP6, but have gone one better, not only have ABIT included DUAL processor sockets, but have also incorporated the new VIA VT82C686B South Bridge chipset allowing access to the now vast range of ATA/100 hard disk drives, this is backed by the popular ABIT choice of the Highpoint Technology's HPT370 PCI Dual Channel Ultra UDMA/ATA 100 RAID Controller, which incorporates Raid 0,1 and 0+1. A word of warning if you are going to be using the VP6 on dual based processors; don't try using Celeron processors as these will clearly not work, only Pentium III processors work in dual mode, and this is of course subject to your version of Windows supporting Dual processors.
NOTE: Ensure you have the latest bios [VP6UR] when purchasing your system. This version provides stability and the kind of performance we have all come to expect from ABIT range of Motherboards.

How we carried out our test

Our objective was to test the performance, implementation, stability, and compatibility of the VP6 Motherboard. We used the Intel Pentium III 733MHz FC-PGA processor and to achieve our objective, we tested using 3DMARK 2000, Content Creation Winstone 2000 and BAPCo's SYSmark 2000.

Next