Date:
Thursday , April 06, 2000
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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ABIT VT6X4 133A

ABIT joins the hunt with their own offering of a Via Apollo Pro 133A board. You gotta love the name they stamped on this one. The ABIT VT6X4. I thought it was some super-secret spy plane when I saw that in print. We have seen some of the other boards in this category and have wondered if the word "Pro" should be applied when talking about this chipset. It has been plagued with poor benchmark performance, but does a benchmark mean the board is junk? Hardly. Sometimes I think we give too much relevance to these manufactured means of measuring. Although, I think we would be somewhat lost without them also.

Let's just all cut to the chase here. We have ABIT's latest board that was supplied to us by Azzo Computers. They are carrying this board in stock if you wanna pick one up. Mad props to Azzo for keeping us a float in new hardware to show off!

As it states above we have the ABIT Via 133A mainboard called the VT6X4. In a way this does not even seem like an ABIT board. The BIOS it uses is their older style, not the newer SoftBIOSIII. Although you DO have the ability to F10, save and exit from just about any screen which is an awesome feature to have if you are a hardcore tweaker. Another reason this does not seem like an ABIT board is because of the Front Side Bus Selections, or lack there of. What I see happening here is that we have been spoiled by the latest 150+ options on the BX boards.

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The VT6X4 offers the following: 150, 140, 133, 124, 120, 115, 110, 105, 100, 83, 75, and 66. Almost seems bare doesn't it, but honestly it did not hold us back in any way. I think it is all a matter of perception... I just wish they would have sacrificed the 124 and 133 for 155 and 160! :)

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Here is a quick pic of the board. It has all the regular fare and like always I am not going to waste your time with a page full of specs. They can be found right here if you feel the desire to check them out. One thing that is worth mention is that the VT6X4 has on-board sound. This is easily disabled and we did not test it at all. But if you are building a box for Grandma, this might be something that could come in handy to save you a little green.

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Other little perks that come with the VIA 133A chipset are the native support for 4X AGP (which is really not taken advantage of yet by most software) and the support for ATA66. No nasty add on card needed here.

Our test bed consisted of us using a Win98SE OS, an unlocked PIII Coppermine 667 CPU, an ABIT Siluro GeForce, 128 Megs of Infineon SDRam from Azzo Computer, Western Digital 10Gig 7200 RPM Hard Drive, and a 40X NoName CD-Rom. All the tests we have run here were done with the CPU OverClocked to 750MHz. I decided on that speed due to the fact that I think many of you will be OCing new Celeron-IIs and PIIIs on this board. While we only used one clock speed, we did use two separate bus speeds. (150 x 5) and (7.5 x 100)

The drivers we used for these tests are as follows: nVidia 3.68 Detonator drivers (we started having problems with the 5.13s), 4.17 Via Drivers.

This is an ATX form factor board and couple of things stand out. The SDRam slots are about 2.75 inches (69.85mm) from the Slot1, so there is enough room to get a good-sized CPU Cooler in there.

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One last feature on this board that is worthy of mention is the fact that it has a HEADER for TWO more USB ports. This means you get twice as many as you are most likely used to. With many new USB devices out, this could possibly save you the cost of a USB Hub in the future. The actual plugs themselves were NOT included with my board, and I am not real sure where to find them, but I don't think it would be too hard to nail down with a vendor or two looking for you.

We have lots of benchmarks to show you so let's get going.