Installation:

Installation posed no problems whatsoever. Both of my 800MHz PIIIs were cB0 stepping but one was made in Mayalsia, the other in the Philippines. This did not seem to cause any conflicts, though ABIT recommends that your CPUs be identical. 128MB of Siemens CAS2 PC133 SDRAM went in DIMM1 (the slot closest to the edge), an ABIT Siluro GF2 MX in the AGP slot and a Creative Labs SBLive! in PCI 3, which does not share its IRQ. The hard drive I used was a 20GB Maxtor DiamondMax. The HighPoint 370 chip is infamous for not working well with Maxtor hard drives, so I was sure to put it on IDE1. Nor does the HighPoint controller support ATAPI devices: my old Ricoh MP7040A CR-RW went on IDE2. I hooked up my 300W Codegen power supply, and got the POST screen with absolutely no problems.

Holding down the delete key, I came to the famous blue screen of ABIT's SoftMenu. I resisted the urge to start playing around with front side bus speeds and contented myself with disabling the High Point controller ("ATA 100 RAID Controller" under Integrated Peripherals… I hate having to wait those extra ten seconds each time I reboot while the computer searches for something that's not there) and enabling AGP4X and FastWrites (under "Advanced Chipset Features").

A clean install of Windows 2000, VIA 4 in 1 drivers version 4.28 (ABIT's CD includes version 4.26), the latest nVidia Detonator driver, and ABIT's newest BIOS update (ID: WK, available at http://fae.abit.com.tw/download/bios/vp6/index-e.htm), and I was ready to go.

WCPUID told me that while my system bus was actually checking in at 133.1MHz, my CPUs were running at 798.57MHz. Motherboard Monitor 5 was in agreement with SoftMenu in reporting the I/OVoltage at 3.3v. However, MBM reported the Vcore level as 1.60v, whereas SoftMenu had told me the CPU default was 1.65v. This didn't surprise me much, as it appears that lately ABIT has become fanatically paranoid about voltage tweaks and people frying their CPUs… pretty odd coming from the company that pioneered this technology