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.

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Hard Drive Performance:

Let's start with the ATA33 feature shown in full color. This board does have good overall transfer rates. These benches show a Western Digital 10 Gig 7200 RPM Drive.

First, the ATA33 marks with DMA enabled at 750MHz clock speed on a 100MHz bus. (oops, I see now I snapped this pic before I got the CPU usage, but it was in the 3% range).

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Now how bout a look at ATA33 at 750MHz clock speed on a 150MHz bus.

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Without splitting hairs here, the results are simply the same. We did not think we would see a difference here, but we also wanted to point out that we could run our drive on the 150MHz FSB without problem. The PCI bus defaults to 37.5MHz at this point, 3.5MHz over the spec speed it was running at 100MHz FSB. I am NOT a Hard Drive connoisseur but I think these numbers show a pretty solid performer.

Now the ATA66 numbers.

First the 750MHz clock speed on the 100MHz FSB.

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Second the 750MHz clock speed on the 150MHz FSB.

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We do see a jump in both the Read Burst Speed as well as a slight jump in Access Time (which is bad). The Burst Speed going up by up to 7.mbps is a pretty good jump overall, but a 10% increase is more likely what you will see effect you unless you are banging out the 150MHz bus.

Overall, a decent performer, and solid as a rock. We had no disk access problems the entire time we tested. Head to TCD Labs for your own version of HD Tach, you can get a limited option version for free. Still I think this shows that ATA66 is not the big winner that it is sometimes made out to be.

CPU Performance:

So far we have OverClocked 3 CPUs on this board, ALL with great results. A 600E clocked to over 800MHz at default voltage. A Celeron-II 533 clocked to 800MHz with only a bump of .2 volts. Finally our Engineering Sample 667 Coppermine ran Prime95 for over 48 hours on a 150MHz FSB.

When it comes to stability, this board and the other VIA 133A board we have tested have not been surpassed by ANY of the BX boards we have tested. Pound for pound (or ounce for ounce) the ABIT VT6X4 is as solid as any mainboard we have ever seen, period. Reminds us of the BP6 days. :)

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We did run a set of 3D Mark2000 results comparing the 100MHz bus to the 150 MHz bus. Our results we got are available for download HERE and HERE if you want to check out the guts of the test and see where the differences really happened.

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Keep in mind that the ONLY setting changed here was the FSB and multiplier, but the CPU is still running the same speed. All memory settings were used at default and the ABIT GeForce was NOT OCed for this these tests. Basically all we have really changed is the bus speed that the memory sits on. Yes, the PCI and AGP bus are increased a bit, but I don't think they have given us an 886 point increase. Let's look at the memory and how it works on the VT6X4 when we put a little "umph" behind it.