The P6BAP-Me is Elite's latest Micro-ATX motherboard based around the VIA 82c693A/596B chipset. This allows the motherboard to take practically any CPU you'd like to throw at it apart from the Slot 1 Pentium III's. As it is not based on a current Intel chipset, it gets away from the dreaded i810 video on board problem by having its own AGP slot although this disappointingly only runs in 2X mode. The hard drive channels will both run in UDMA/66 mode allowing connection of upto 4 IDE devices. The board also supports 66Mhz, 100Mhz and 133Mhz Front Side Bus so there is quite a bit of future proofing in there for processor upgrades in the future. It comes with an onboard CMI chipset sound controller and with a modem riser card to enable the on-board 56K modem.

We used the Celeron 433 to test the board and it recognised everything quite happily when it was first switched on and went through the Windows 98 installation procedure without any problems. The onboard sound and modem just needed to be installed from the driver CD supplied and after installing our video drivers we were ready to roll. Elite have never really been renowned for the lightning performance of their motherboards and they aren't about to revolutionise the industry with the P6BAP-Me. With a Winstone of 19.1, the P6BAP-Me is well below par as it comes out of the box. It was not until we entered the BIOS and had a bit of a tweak that we managed to get that score up to 20.1, a much more respectable result for the Celeron Processor. Even more disappointing however was the 3D Mark 2000 result that barely got over 1000. This sort of result is not really practical for playing the latest 3D games and is rather disappointing considering the TNT2 card being used, although it was an increase of over 10% to the motherboard in its default configuration.

Next on our testing agenda was the Windows 2000 testing. This would have been very interesting if Windows had actually installed on the Motherboard. Everything seemed to be fine until the installation completed and the networking configuration screen was supposed to be displayed - the system just went absolutely dead. It seemed to be OK in safe mode but just wouldn't boot normally. We tried contacting Elite but because it is a new board for them they hadn't completed their Windows 2000 tests themselves, so they weren't able to shed any light on the matter.

At that point we lost interest and gave up trying to get it working. The Motherboard seems to be very interesting, with a lot of good features on it but until the Windows 2000 problem is resolved it is just not fair to pass a final verdict. We'll give an update as soon as we know anything!

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