|
Even
if you've had experience with the options
available on other Abit boards, you should take a
look at these...
THE
BIOS
You
have control over virtually every aspect of the
VP6. Abit's SoftMenu III allows for FSB
adjustments in 1MHz increments all the way up to
178MHz! We would have liked to have had the
ability to adjust voltages separately for each CPU
though. As it stands now changing the
voltage affects both CPUs, maybe in future BIOS
revisions we'll see this change. (hint, hint)
There
are also quite a few options available to tweak
system RAM. The settings we show in the
above screenshot (Turbo, 4-Way Interleaving, No
Delay, CAS 2) yielded the best performance.
You have to populate the board with high quality
RAM to be able to use these settings though.
Do yourself a favor and check with Mushkin
and Crucial
if you're planning on purchasing RAM anytime soon.
 |
| Overclocking
With The Abit VP6 |
| Almost
Perfect |
|
Before
we go into our overclocking experience with the
VP6, we should point out that Intel
supplied us with 2 matched, un-locked 1GHz.
Pentium III CPUs. Having the ability to
choose our multiplier allowed us to find the
perfect balance between performance and
stability. We settled for a speed of
1.088GHz (7.5 X 145MHz), even though we were able
to hit 1.125GHz with these particular CPUs.
At that higher clockspeed, we had to set our RAM
to CAS 3 which decreased memory performance enough
to offset the 37MHz increase. We're happy to
report that even at these high speeds, the VP6
performed flawlessly and was rock solid throughout
testing.
The
H.H. Test Rig was configured as follows....
 |
| Test
System |
| The
baseline for performance |
|
Abit VP6 (VIA
Apollo Pro 133) with 2 X Pentium III Processors @
1GHz. & 1.088GHz.
256MB
of Mushkin 2-2-2 Rev. 2 RAM
IBM
DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drives (RAID
0)
nVidia
GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card
Sound
Blaster Live X-Gamer
Adaptec
AHA-2940UW Pro SCSI Controller
Plextor
UltraPLEX 40Max
Windows
2000 Professional SP1
Direct
X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers V.7.17
VIA
Chipset drivers (v4.28a)
 |
| Processor
Information |
| WCPUID |
|
Here's
a look at our CPUs before we get into the all
important benchmarks...
WCPUID
Abit
wasn't very aggressive with the timings on the
VP6. At our 1GHz. CPU's default settings,
WCPUID reports a speed of 998MHz. This is
probably done to insure stability for non-overclockers.
Sandra
and CC Winstone |
