ABIT VA6 Motherboard
Review by James 'Agg' Rolfe

Manufactured by: Abit (Taiwan)
Manufacturer's page for this product: Abit VA6
Availability: Fairly uncommon. Not at Eyo, Computermarket or AusPCMarket. Anyone seen 'em?

If you've been following the progress of Intel's i820 chipset over the last couple of months, you will have seen the delays and problems it's been experiencing. Now that it has been launched, it's dependence on the ludicrously-priced RAMBUS technology has severely limited it's acceptance by the market. Of course, it's possible to have i820 without RAMBUS, as in the case of the Asus P3C2000 (our review here), but this requires a Memory Translator Hub which has a drastic effect on performance. This has left Intel in something of an embarrassing situation. Their primary market, processors, has a new product (Coppermine P3's) but they have no chipset to support it. The coppermines require a 133MHz system bus and their major chipset product, i440BX, is problematic at best at that speed due to the overclocked PCI and AGP buses. This has left the market wide open for a chipset with native 133MHz FSB support and VIA have stepped up to the plate with their Apollo Pro 133.

In actual fact, the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset has been around for a while. It was competing with BX months before i820 hit the streets. It has only really started to come into it's own now that a hole exists in the market for a 133MHz-native chipset. VIA have recently announced the Apollo Pro 133A chipset (note the trailing A) but boards based on this chipset are still very thin on the ground. One of the most recently announced (late December 99) boards based upon the previous (non-A) chipset comes from Abit - the VA6. The specs are as follows:

CPU
1. Supports Intel Pentium® III 450~733MHz processor based on 100 & 133 MHz FSB
2. Supports Intel Pentium® II 233~450MHz processor based on 66 & 100 MHz FSB
3. Supports Intel CeleronTM 266~533MHz processor based on 66 MHz FSB
4. Reserves support for future Intel Pentium®III processors

Chipset
1. VIA chipset(VT82C693A and VT82C686A)
2. Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
3. Supports AGP 1X/2X(Sideband) 3.3V device.

Memory
1. Three 168-pin DIMM sockets support SDRAM module
2. Supports up to 768MB MAX.(8, 16, 32, 64, 128,256MB SDRAM)
3. Supports ECC

Audio
1. AC'97 Digital Audio controller integrated
2. AC'97 Audio CODEC on board
3. Audio driver included

System BIOS
1. SOFT MENU(tm) II eliminates the need for jumpers or DIP switches to set CPU parameters
3. Award Plug and Play BIOS supports APM and DMI
3. Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS
4. Year 2000 Compliant

Multi I/O Functions
1. 1x Floppy Port (up to 2.88MB)
2. 2x Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66 devices
3. 1x Parallel Port(EPP/ECP)
4. 2x Serial Ports
5. PS/2 Keyboard and PS/2 Mouse Connectors
6. 2x USB Connectors
7. Build-in IrDA TX/RX header
8. On board USB header for Two extra USB channels
9. Audio Connectors (Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in, and MIDI/Game Port)

Miscellaneous
1. ATX form factor
2. 1 AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots
3. Hardware monitoring - Including Fan speed, Voltages, System environment temperature and one Thermal header for CPU or other temperature monitoring.
4. Built-in Wake on LAN header
5. Built-in Wake on Modem header
6. PC99 Color connectors

Notable inclusions are the 2 ISA slots and on-board audio. Including audio on-board is something that impresses some people and irritates others. I'm in the second group - I view it as extra cost on the motherboard which I will most likely disable and use an add-on sound card anyway - surely few people will be content with Sound Blaster Pro compatible sound cards these days. Courtesy of the VIA Apollo Pro chipset we also get UDMA/66 on both IDE channels and Abit have once again come through with good hardware/thermal monitoring and fan headers on board - a total of 3 fan headers (2 intelligent) and 2 thermal sensors.

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