ABit VT6X4

Board-Revision: D

BIOS-Version: March 24, 2000

Many readers missed the ABit motherboard in my initial review, as this company has become very popular thanks to their excellent overclocking features. The VT6X4 can be configured via Soft Menu II, making all jumpers or DIP switches obsolete. It comes with three DIMM sockets, five PCI and two ISA slots. Thanks to the south bridge 686A and a VIA audio codec chip, the VT6X4 does also come with AC97 sound.

Three fan headers are provided to cool your system. Friends of multimedia hardware will be happy with the two additional USB ports. Yet they can only be used after the purchase of a connector cable, which has not been included by ABit. All connectors are clearly labeled, but the power supply connector is situated behind the CPU (upper right corner on the photo), which in as unpractical as the lower DIMM locks. They have to be closed before plugging in an AGP card.

These little weaknesses regarding the boards's design are the only reasons to complain. ABit's manual is very easy to read and comprehensive. Hardware and BIOS are described quite good. There's even an illustrated description of the BIOS update process.

ABit's motherboard performed quite well, scoring third place in the SYSmark runs using Windows 98 SE and Windows NT 4.0 SP6. It scored sixth place in both gaming benchmarks. Some of you may be glad to hear that this board supports up to 1.5 GBytes ECC memory.

The great features, combined with almost perfect overclocking abilities and excellent reliability should make sure that almost everybody should be happy with this motherboard.