Review: ABIT VP6 Followup

ABIT VP6 Followup

Introduction

Now that we've had a chance to look more closely at the VP6, we thought it would be wise to do a follow up article and go a bit more in depth than the original review.

The original review focused mainly on the numbers to allow you to compare it with other boards. This time, we're going to examine the little details that make this board stand out from the crowd.

What better way to start than by taking a closer look at the board itself.

Hardware Specification

• ATX form factor motherboard
• 2 x S370 sockets supporting Intel Pentium III processors in single or dual processor mode
• VIA Technology supporting chipset (VT82C694X north bridge, VT82C686B south bridge)
• ACPI compliant
• 5 x PCI slots (PCI 2.1 compliant)
• 1 x AGP 4x slot (supports 1x/2x/4x)
• 4 DIMM slots (supports normal and ECC memory up to 2GB using 512Mb modules)
• 2 x UDMA IDE ports (4 devices supporting UDMA 33/66/100) from 686B southbridge
• 2 x UDMA IDE ports (4 devices supporting UDMA 33/66/100, RAID levels 0,1,0+1) from Highpoint HPT370 controller
• 2 x PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse
• Floppy port
• 2 x serial ports
• 2 x onboard USB ports with support for 2 extra ports (provided on backplate via fly-off cable)
• Hardware monitoring (temperatures, fan speeds and voltages)
• Award BIOS supporting DMI, APM, ACPI, incorporating Abit Softmenu III.

The only thing possibly missing from the above spec is a 6th PCI slot. With the power available from this board (dual CPU's, hardware RAID, 4 DIMM slots etc) it's a bit disappointing that we don't see a 6th PCI slot, especially since there is no ISA slot. Apart from that, what more could you ask for?!

Another interesting point to note is the support for up to 2Gb memory, including support for ECC memory. It seems Abit is aiming to capture a piece of the low cost server market with this board by including support for such a large amount of memory. On an Abit board, 4 DIMM slots usually means the inclusion of a Texas Instruments memory data buffer, something not usually used by other board makers in this market segment. Last seen on the KA7, the data buffer aims to stabilise the data path between the CPU and memory.

We also see a heatsink on the northbridge chip. Since the board supports dual CPU's and an extra load on the northbridge, it would have been nice to see active cooling of the chip with a fan. It was a nice inclusion on the KT7-RAID, but extra fans mean extra cost, so we can understand it's omission from a price point of view.

The provision for extra USB ports, in this case on a case back-plate which you connect to a header on the board via fly-off cable, is always nice to see. Most new boards have the capability and it is nice to see the inclusion of the ports in the box. The only problem, is that extra USB ports are probably more useful on the front of the case for connection of digital cameras, MP3 players etc. Hopefully on future boards, we may see the option to connect the extra ports to a custom 5¼ inch or a 3½ inch drive bay panel and the backplate.

The HPT370 controller is the same as the one used on quite a few Abit boards and provides support for an extra 4 UDMA devices and most interestingly, hardware RAID. I first came across this controller in the KT7-RAID and while we haven't tested the RAID features on the VP6, they work perfectly on the KT7-RAID so we can assume you'll see the same benefits. Is also works perfectly as a standard UDMA/100 controller.

There are no major flaws in the layout of the board. It's nice to see the ATX power connector along the top edge of the board, where your power supply is likely to be. This ensures the power cable doesn't have to dragged across a CPU and can be kept out of the way. On a fairly cramped board such as the VP6, good airflow across the board is essential, especially is you intend on overclocking. The layout of the VP6 lets you have a fuss free case, with cables kept out of the way.

Performance & Tweaking

The numbers in the original review are indicative of what you can achieve out-of-the-box with the VP6 with no-tweaking. Here's a quick recap.

Firstly the test system:

• Abit VP6 dual processor motherboard
• 2 x Intel Pentium III FC-PGA 700Mhz CPU's (SL45Y) running at 933Mhz (7x133)
• 2 x GlobalWin FOP-38 heatsink and fan combos
• 384Mb Cube PC133 CAS2 memory
• 2 x IBM Deskstar DTLA-307045 46.1Gb 7200rpm UDMA/100 disks
• Creative Labs Graphics Blaster TNT2 Ultra 32Mb AGP with NVIDIA Detonator 6.18 drivers
• Soundblaster Live! Platinum

Original Scores

MadOnion 3DMark2000

3DMark2000 scores 3392 on the test system. Unfortunately the TNT2 Ultra doesn't let the board stretch its legs.

Quake3: Arena (1.17)

Here are the Quake3 scores with the VIA 4-in-1 4.26 drivers without tweaking (SMP scores only). The game settings we used were:

· Simple Items: Off

· Marks On Walls: On

· Ejecting Brass: On

· Dynamic Lights: On

· Identify Target: On

· High Quality Sky: On

· Sync Every Frame: Off

· Force Player Models: Off

For the graphics settings, we used the default Quake3 Normal setting and changed only the resolution.

SiSoft Sandra 2000

Rather than present you with the graphics from the original review, I've created a table with the results. Graphics for the updated scores will follow!

The VIA chipset has notoriously low memory bandwidth scores when compared to other chipsets. So the most benefit to be had tweaking this system were to be found when tweaking the memory subsystem. This chipset benefits very much from having good memory. While you are free to run your memory at a slower speed than the CPU FSB, you will be seriously crippling the potential performance of the system if you do. In the original article, we discovered that setting the memory latency to CAS2, would blue screen Windows 2000 upon boot.

Because we had witnessed the same 384Mb of Cube memory run happily at 150Mhz CAS2 in an Asus P3V4X, we assumed the inability to run at CAS2 would be present, no matter what memory was in the system. I'm quite happy to report that we were wrong! I recently purchased one of Crucial's famous 256Mb CAS2 PC133 sticks for my KT7-RAID system. Removing the Cube memory and replacing it with the new Crucial stick allowed us to run CAS2 at 133Mhz, with the Turbo settings and 4-way bank interleaving turned on! These are widely regarded as the BIOS settings to extract most performance from your memory.

Happy that the system was running fine with these settings, we benchmarked again with the memory tweaks applied. Here's what we found.

New Scores with Memory Tweaks

MadOnion 3DMark2000



You can put the very small increase down to the fact that the TNT2 Ultra is a bottleneck in the system at this speed and resolution. The CPU cannot feed it data quick enough and spends time waiting for the card to become ready again. This is in contrast to a system with say a GeForce2 Ultra, where it would sit and wait for the CPU to feed it data and the CPU then becomes a bottleneck. In this system, the TNT2 Ultra doesn't do the system justice and the memory tweaks have little to no effect. In a system with a faster graphics card, the memory tweaks would give a measurable performance increase.

Quake3: Arena (1.17)

We used exactly the same setup as outlined above, except this time with the memory tweaks applied. VIA 4-in-1 4.26 drivers were used along with NVIDIA's Detonator 6.18 drivers and DirectX 7. Exactly the same as before.

At 640x480 and 800x600, the TNT2 Ultra is holding the rest of the system back and the memory tweaks have no effect. However, at 320x240, the TNT2 Ultra isn't holding the system back and the memory tweaks are showing what they can do with a 7.7fps increase (5%) over the non-tweaked system. None too shabby, especially when trying to extract maximum performance.

SiSoft Sandra 2000

We'll miss out the CPU and drive benchmarks here. Clock speed (933Mhz) and drives never changed and the scores are unaffected by these tweaks as expected. We'll also show the old benchmark for visual comparison.

Before



After


The memory tweaks give us an increase of 7-8% over the old score. With the VIA chipset being a notorious underachiever when it comes to memory bandwidth, every little helps. You need to invest in good quality memory (Crucial, Mushkin and Cube come highly recommended from the Hexus team) to see the benefits but it is well worth it, especially with machines based on VIA chipsets.

Overclocking

We had high hopes of bringing you benchmarks of the system running at 1001Mhz, but alas, our poor CPU's wouldn't quite make it. The pair of CPU's in the test machine wouldn't do much past 933Mhz and stay stable. The pair of CPU's in our second VP6 would run stable at 980Mhz and POST at 1001, but sadly they are on their way to live in another VP6 and we don't have them anymore. But we can't complain at 933 from the 700's we have. When you do find a stable overclocked speed, it's just that, very stable. Nothing can throw this board when you get it booting OK and we cannot fault it's overclocked stability. We bought both boards with our own money, so if they did show instability when overclocked, we would say so.

We are confident the CPU's will do 1Ghz, we just need to push the limits past where the GlobalWin FOP-38's take us. A pair of peltiers is in the offing to drag these CPU's kicking and screaming past the magical 1000Mhz mark, but that's a whole new review :)

While running the CPU's at 933, the CPU temperatures as shown by Motherboard Monitor 5 never got past 35C, even when running at full load. While this may sound low, it's just a bit too hot for these CPU's we think, at the speeds we are trying to hit.

Conclusion

After some of the harsh words we said about the VP6 in the original review, we are glad to say the problems we had have disappeared! There may be slight incompatibilities with some RAM sticks (most boards do!), but switching to the Crucial made all our reservations about the VP6's memory performance disappear. The problems we had with the new VIA drivers are gone. We stick by our statement that you should install a new operating system with the 4.25 drivers and upgrade to the 4.26's, rather than go with the 4.26 drivers straight off. Do that and everything should be peachy!

We will take a final look at the VP6 when we have better cooling for the CPU's we have and a faster graphics card to test with. We are disappointed not to have a faster graphics card to test with, to show you just what the board can really do. With a good card, we are sure it will shine.

It still looks like the board is available in limited numbers, but keep trying if you are having a hard time sourcing a board, it's worth the effort!