ABIT VP6 -- Dual Pentium III

Introduction

This was probably the most highly-anticipated motherboard of 2000. I had been waiting for it since Autumn 1999, when I heard that Intel was changing its Celerons from PPGA to FCPGA and that my ABIT BP6 had reached the end of its road. Certainly the BP6 had created a whole new subculture of SMP fanatics like me; it was the first time dual processing had ever entered into our price range, and once we'd tasted dual goodness, it was tough to go back. 

For the uninitiated, here's a little background: SMP stands for Simultaneous MultiProcessing, which allows you to distribute your computer's workload between more than one CPU. It does not mean that it will operate twice as fast. Rather, you get the utmost in stability, and you get to open about a gazillion windows with CPU-intensive applications without having to worry about system hangs or BSODs. (Or should that be BSes of D?)

The BP6 was revolutionary in that it gave us the chance to set up dual systems with the then super-cheap and super-overclockable Celeorns. But Intel had never intended to make SMP available for the mainstream "enthusiast" market. If you wanted to cough up for dual Xeons and an i840-based server board, that was fine. The last thing they wanted was a low cost SMP solution cutting into that market. Indeed, Intel had even announced that Celerons could not be made to work dually. Thankfully, the engineers at ABIT demonstrated that this was not the case, and SMP hit the mainstream.

So here we are a year or so later. Celeron 2s actually have been SMP-disabled, and the dual Socket A 760MP chipset from AMD has not arrived yet. (Rumors have it that when it does arrive, it will only be in an expensive, 6-layer "Extended ATX" form factor.) That leaves us with Pentium IIIs. The "DP" revision of VIA's 694X chipset provides SMP support for PIIIs, and there has been a rash of motherboards based on this chipset on the market. The ABIT VP6 is one such motherboard. A truly tempting piece of hardware, let's see if it lives up to expectations…

One quick note before we start: Windows9X/ME can't make use of dual CPUs. You're going to have to switch to Windows NT/2000, Linux, or Free BeOS. For this review, I'm using Windows 2000 Professional.