ABIT VP6

Company: ABIT
Product: VP6 Dual Intel Motherboard
Street Price: ~ $165
Complete Motherboard Spec's: ABIT-USA Spec's
Date Reviewed: May 27, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Getting Down To Specifics (Cont):

When I first got everything hooked up, I started out at a conservative 133FSB which yielded 933MHz for each CPU. I installed Windows 2000 without a single problem, along with all the appropriate drivers. The next step was to do some serious overclocking. I immediately took it up to 150FSB @ 1.85v which was 1050MHz and it ran fine. Next step was to take it to 155FSB (1085MHz) @ 1.9v. I could run 155FSB with the two sticks of RAM in the computer at the same time @ CAS2.

Anything beyond 155FSB and I would get system dumps from W2k. The only way to get more voltage to the CPU was to perform a simple voltage mod. Since the default voltage was 1.7v, I figured I could easily adjust it for 1.8v, which would give me a max of 2.0v in the BIOS. To perform the mod I took a single strand of wire from a spare piece of wire I had laying around. Then I carefully wrapped the appropriate VID to an adjacent VSS. This only took a couple minutes for both CPU's, and if I ever want to undo it I just simply have to pull the wire off.

So now that the CPU's can go up to 2.0v in the BIOS, it was time to do some more overclocking. When I set the voltage to 2.0v I actually got about 1.97v for some reason. However I was able to take the CPU's up to 160FSB (1,120MHz) but I had to lower the RAM to CAS3. Keep in mind this is with two sticks of RAM in it. While running all the tests, my CPU averaged a load temp around 98F-100F, which isn't that bad for 2.0v (However MBM5 showed the actual voltage at 1.95v). Keep in mind this isn't the actual core temp, but the thermal probe that is touching the bottom side of the CPU.

Curious about stability, I decided to populate all four DIMM slots and see how far I could overclock. I know from previous experience that some boards HATE having all their DIMM slots used and suffer severe problems when trying to overclock. The other two sticks of RAM I used were from Memory Man & OCZ. So now I have 4 totally unmatched sticks of RAM I fired it up at 150FSB. To my amazement it worked perfectly, so I tried for 155FSB. 155FSB worked fine at CAS3, so I tried for 160FSB. I could run 160FSB BUT I had to set the memory clock to HSTCLK-33, and this killed my memory throughput. However, just knowing that the board could run stable at 160FSB (or perhaps even higher) with all 4 DIMM slots being used is just plain awesome.

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