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Abit VP6 vs. Epox EP-D3VA

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Saturday, December 09, 2000

Introduction

Over the past week I have had my hands on 3 of the new dually motherboards. The first was the Freeway Designs FWD-P3C4XD, granted, this board isn't exactly available to the general public (not in the US at least), but its a fine board with it's own strengths and a few weaknesses. The second was an Epox EP-D3VA because my two P3 866's just couldn't wait for the Abit VP6. The Epox turned out to be a mistake, so I returned it and ordered the VP6. This review is primarily on the VP6, however I will touch on some of the differences between it and the EP-D3VA.

Here is the breakdown.
Introduction
Board Features/specs
Installation
Benchmarks: Abit vs. Epox
Benchmarks: Abit Memory
Conclusion

Board Features/specs

The VP6 is Abit's follow-on product to the BP6 dual processor motherboard. The board is a dual socket 370 supporting Dual Pentium 3 Coppermine chips or One Celeron or Cyrix processor. The VP6 includes the High Point 370 Controller which adds 4 IDE connectors to the board, all of which support Ultra ATA-100 with 2 of them having support for IDE RAID. It has 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI, there are 4 banks of memory with support up to 2GB of RAM. I won't go into too much detail here if you want more info check out Abit's website.

The board comes packaged with all the necessary stuff:
2 Ultra ATA-66/100 IDE cables
1 Floppy cable
1 User manual
1 HPT370 driver diskette
1 Driver/Doc CD