Abit BP6 Motherboard Review by Goy Larsen

Abit has a very interesting motherboard out these days, the BP6, this a dual Celeron MB with built in UDMA66 support and Intel's BX chip set. It has all the bells and whistles of Abit's regular P2/3 MB's, including the very handy jumper less "CPU Soft menu" for the overclockers among you.

I am currently running this card with 2 Celeron 400, and I have to say that this is a pretty fast combo for WinNT, as you probably know, Win9x doesn't support more than one CPU, but the upcoming Win2000 does, and these days there are a few games that will run under NT, GPL is among those and HAS support for multiple CPUs, interesting no ?

Features;

  • 1 AGP slot
  • 5 PCI slots
  • 2 ISA slots
  • 3 DIMM slots

    This board comes as a regular sized MB and fits in most Midi Towers, ATX only of course, and has all the features we've come to expect from a good MB today, hardware monitoring with CPU temps included (very handy for the overclockers), so you're not giving up on anything, except the ability to run regular P2/P3 CPUs, but the speed difference between a Celeron and a "genuine" P2 isn't that big, looking at some prices on the "net", this MB was about 20$ more than the regular Abit MBs, and you get 2 Celeron 400s for about the same price as a P2-400 these days, so it's a viable alternative for those that run NT in some way, personally I have a dual boot setup with Win98 and NT on the same HD, you have to run FAT16 to do this, but there's always tradeoffs.

    So how much slower is a Celeron 400 than a P2-400, considering Win9x don't support multiple CPUs ?

    I think most tests would land a Celeron 400 somewhere around a P2-333/350, so you still got decent Win9x performance.

    Of course, if you've already got that P2-400, this may not be the card for you, but if you're still running an aging P1 or an early P2 and are looking to upgrade, give this one a look, after all, Win2000 IS coming out, sometime.......

    So is there anything negative to say about this board, except for the lack of a Slot1 ?

    Not really, but you need to make sure that you get good quality RAM, Abit boards are usually a bit picky when it comes to RAM, and this board is no exception, and then you add WinNT to the mix, so I would definitely buy from a reputable source, but once you get that sorted, it's a very nice board indeed.