ABIT BP6

"Nothing is impossible!" We are so glad to receive ABIT's BP6 for our testing, thanks Nic. ABIT's BP6 is the FISRT and ONLY Dual Socket 370 Motherboard you can buy. If you want a low cost solution for dual processors machine, look no futher, buy yourself a BP6, pop in 2 PPGA Celeron Processors and off you go. When you take a closer look at ABIT's BP6, it is more than a just multi-processor capable, it is a feature packed high performance motherboard.

While Intel's 440BX chipset, it is not designed for UDMA/66 standard. UDMA/33 which is what the BX chipset can do the best. It is only cabable of running a maximum of 33MB/s transfer rate per IDE channel. But with today's high performance machine, a higher transfer rate is in demand. ABIT engineer has include the Highpoint HPT366 controller chip on BP6 to support the UDMA/66 specification and therefore it is possible for 66MB/s burst data transfer rate. The UDMA/66 controller is directly connected with the PCI bus in order to provide maximum disc performance. UDMA/66 specification is also backward compatible with both UDMA/33 and existing ATA (IDE) devices like hard-drives and CD-ROMs. Because of the addition of HPT366 UDMA/66 controller on board, BP6 can support up to total of 8 EIDE devices. Two channels (two devices per channel) are controlled by the BX chipset and provide a UDMA/33 interface (the BLACK IDE connectors), and the other two channel are UDMA/66 capable (The WHITE IDE connectors).

The cable for UDMA/66 standard is also slightly different than your old UDMA/33 cable. The UDMA/66 cable is a 80 wires and 40 pin connector cable. The extra wires (what we have told) are grounded and will provide a better, clearer and cleaner signal in the cable. Another factor is, the connectors are color-coded, Blue is connected to the controller, Grey is for slave device and Black is for master device.

A SB-Link connector is also available on this board which is located right next to the PCI slots. BP6 is the ONLY motherboard we tested which is PC99 Compliant. In order to meet PC99 compliant, connectors are color coded to be identified and hooked up easily.

No, this is not a iMac marketing scheme.

Overclock is for sure today's hottest topic for the power hungry users. BP6 once again clearly demonstrate their commitment to customer's need. This is (to our knowledge) the only motherboard can give you substantial overclock features. If you are already a owner of BX6 (or BX6 Ver 2) or BH6 you already know how handy is their SoftMenu II jumperless CPU Frequency settings. ABIT's engineer has once again making all overclocker's dream come true. On BP6, you can now go with 1MHz increment on FSB setting in between 82MHz to 100MHz range. Why overclockers need 1MHz increments, espically in this range? For most Celeron Processors it can run at 83MHz FSB without problems but it will fail at 100MHz FSB under normal conditions. So it means the Celeron Processor fails somewhere in between. From 66MHz to 75Mhz is about 13% incerment, and 75MHz to 83MHz is about 11% incerment, but from 83MHz to 100MHz is a whopping 20% jump. So you can see Celeron overclockers would like to have a FSB somewhere in between to get the extra juice from their CPU. Here is a list of frequencies you can set (from SoftMenu II) for you to fine-tune your overclocked Celeron Processor.