ABIT VH6-II

Company: ABIT
Product: VH6-II Motherboard
Street Price: ~$95
Complete Motherboard Spec's: ABIT Spec's
Date Reviewed: April 16, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Benchmarks:

The VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset has been around for quite some time now and the BIOS tweaks are pretty mature considering ABIT's previous motherboards that used the same chipset. Nothing from the benchmarks is really out of place, the memory performance is in the same ballpark as other boards running at the same speed. I wasn't really expecting any surprising numbers, the benchmarks were run not only to check performance, but also to test stability.

Conclusions:

The VH6-II is an excellent value, packed full of features that many other boards on the market don't have. The system ran flawlessly at 150FSB, and I'm confident it could run higher provided you have the CPU and memory to do so. ABIT's SOFTMENU III is what really puts this board over the top, I love being able to type in any FSB I want, and not having to deal with a single jumper or dip switch.

Having a big gap between the AGP & first PCI slot is a welcome site for overclockers that use aftermarket cooling on their video cards.

Performance was as expected for the chipset / CPU. Basing the VH6-II off of the VH6 gave ABIT a jump start on BIOS tweaking with performance being great straight out of the box and not having to wait for several BIOS releases to unlock the extra performance enhancing features.

With a cost in the sub-$100 range, this board is practically a steal. The inclusion of onboard audio is nice for the consumer on a budget since it allows them to have decent audio out of the box, then later on they could upgrade to a premium sound card should they feel the need to.

Pros:
  SOFTMENU III
  Excellent Board Layout
  Cost Under $100
  Onboard Audio

Cons:
  No VIO Adjustment

Rating:
For The Average User: 10 / 10
For The Extreme Overclocker: 9 / 10

Back To Extreme Overclocking