BIOS
Abit's famous SoftMenu II is employed on this board, allowing you a wide range of FSB settings - 66, 75, 83, 100, 103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140 and 150MHz. Not as impressive as some of their later BX offerings such as the BP6 and BE6-II, but a comfortable spread above 100MHz. Below 100MHz the jumps are dissapointingly wide, the dreaded 83 to 100MHz gap is there which can be a killer for high-multiplier Celerons. At 100MHz the PCI divisor becomes 1/3 and at 133MHz it becomes 1/4. This is partly how VIA can claim native 133MHz FSB support - the PCI and hence AGP drop neatly back into spec at 133MHz whereas on a BX-based board you are seriously overclocking both buses, usually beyond stability.

A dissapointing absence from this board which is present on Soyo's board based on this chipset, the SY6-VBA-133, is the ability to run the memory at a higher speed than the current FSB. The Abit only allows you to run the DRAM clock at the current FSB or the current FSB-33MHz. On the Soyo you have the option of setting the memory to run at FSB, FSB-PCI or FSB+PCI. So for example at 105 (FSB) / 35 (PCI) you could run the RAM at 140MHz if your RAM can handle it. In my experimentation with the Soyo board I found this increased performance noticeably and had presumed it was a feature of the chipset - if so it's surprising that Abit have not implemented it. However the Abit board has more options for memory timing, allowing you to choose Normal, Medium, Fast and Turbo as well as specific "SDRAM 10ns" and "SDRAM 8ns" settings. There is also a "SDRAM Cycle Length" option which is presumably for CAS delay, the options being 3 and 2. For my testing I used a stick of HTL PC100 CAS2 SDRAM marked -7 so I set the memory for that bank to Turbo and the Cycle Length to 2. Apart from these points the BIOS is pretty much as you would expect from any modern Award-based machine with the usual power-saving and PCI configuration screens etc.

Installation
Despite being a fairly narrow board, the VA6 has plenty of room in front of the Slot1 connector. Abit have wisely placed the power supply plug behind the slot and left plenty of room between the Slot1 and the RAM slots. Using an FDP-32 on a slocket will block 1 of the 3 ram slots (compare this to 2 (and pretty much the third) out of 4 blocked on the Soyo). The Abit lets you boot with RAM only in slot 3 (the farthest from the CPU Slot1 connector) so this will only be an issue if you're trying to use all 3 slots and a very tall cooler. Big P2 coolers such as the Globalwin VEK-32 fit fine.

Another of my pet peeves is present on this board - the RAM slots are so close to the AGP slot that the RAM ejection tabs will foul an AGP card. This doesn't actually reduce any functionality but it's irritating and very fiddly to change RAM without removing the video card.

Software installation was fairly unremarkable. Win98 will install cleanly with this chipset - a few more reboots than a BX board are required for it to detect the various on-board devices but it all goes smoothly enough. The first thing you should do after installing Win98 is install the VIA 4-in-1 driver from the included CD. This enables UDMA on the IDE controllers, the AGP VxD and support for a few other chipset features. Although I didn't try it, the manual assures me that NT4.0 with SP5 will also support this motherboard. Windows 2000 is only mentioned in passing but presumably Microsoft would carry the support from NT forward with the addition of proper AGP support (which, of course, NT4.0 lacks). Support for the on-board sound is of course included on the CD-ROM as is VIA's Hardware Monitor utility but as usual I think it pales next to MBM (get it from the links page). Abit also include Highpoint's XStore Pro which is a caching system to supposedly speed HDD access, and CD Express which is a similar utility for CD-ROM's. I've not experimented with these so I can't say how useful they are.

One noteworthy point is that VIA seem to have fixed the UDMA drivers included with the 4-in-1 driver pack. The ones that shipped with the Soyo board would kill a Win98 install every time but these ones installed flawlessly. A sigh of relief in the AggCave over that one, I can tell you.

As an aside, the included manual is up to Abit's usual high standard - full of screenshots and information from inserting the processor and tweaking the BIOS settings to loading the drivers. Even a novice should be able to set up their system with the help of this manual - much more useful than the "Quick Start Guide" included with many modern motherboards who's manufacturers presumably expect you to browse the CD on another computer to read the full manual - an option not available to many.