ABIT VP6 Features

The following features summarise the architecture of the VP6 Motherboard:

The Abit VP6 is an ATX form-factor Motherboard providing support for currently all Intel PIII Coppermine FC-PGA 370 Processors, although the Intel Celeron is supported in single processor mode, the VP6 was not designed with the Celeron in mind, and as such is better suited for the PIII Coppermine processors. Abit's unique SOFTMENU III has special added features and functions that make it a

must for all tweakers out there allowing you to extract the maximum amount of performance and the highest ratio of tweaks currently available on any platform. Of these the best has to be the massive range of FSB settings it supports from 66, 68, 75, 80, 83, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140, 145 and 150MHz. To top it up from these base settings, you can make adjustments of 0-28MHz and these can be selected in increments of 1MHz, which put mildly is simply breathtaking. As you might expect it supports all the normal industry standard functions, including Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI), with AGP 1X/2X/4X and with the extra feature of four 168-pin DIMM sockets allowing a total of 2GB memory to be utilised. The VP6 has incorporated the new VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset combination of the VT82C694X and the VT82C686B allowing the use of Dual Processor support and the latter supporting the now popular ATA/100 standard. The 686B has been a long time coming, however none other than Abit surpassed it, when they first integrated the Highpoint HPT370 ATA/100 controller into the KT7-Raid Motherboard as early as September this year. The VIA 694X chipset support for Dual processors is a god send in a day and age when performance is demanded rather than desired with computing tasks becoming more processor-intensive, a dual processor system goes a long way allowing for increased performance. This only comes about if you are running software designed for dual (SMP-based) processor systems. Although as we previously discussed the VIA 686B South Bridge fully supports ATA/100, Abit not to be outdone has taken this a step further, and added the Highpoint HPT370 controller which not only supports ATA/100 but also adds RAID support allowing up to four UDMA/ATA 100 disk drives to be hooked up. The icing on the cake without any shadow of a doubt has to be the inclusion of Hot Swapping which allows the removal of drives without shutting the system down and the inclusion of RAID 0,1 and 0+1 support allowing the connection of multiple drives for data mirroring and striping, an excellent feature which was until recently unheard of for IDE based drives. In theory the VP6 includes 4+4 Channels of Bus Master IDE all able to support UDMA 100/66/33 backward compatibility, we did have a chance to test this and although the UDMA 100 and 66 worked perfectly, we did encounter some problems with an old 540Mb UDMA/33 hard disk drive, this was not a major flaw in the VP6, as if you still have such and old drive, then you really should not be using such an advanced Motherboard, but we shall forgive you as you may be saving it as a museum piece as is the case with us. The list of features continues to impress with support for four USB channels, along with the normal serial and parallel ports, and five PCI slots. To sum up the list of features for the VP6 it is a Motherboard that has Dual FC-PGA sockets supporting 133MHz FSB allowing you to make changes in increments of 1MHz up to 150Mhz, 4 X AGP with Ultra DMA 66/100 " RAID 0/1 Technology, with the sophistication and flexibility of ABIT's SOFTMENU III.

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