Monday, September 20, 1999

Performance Test Results

All tests were performed under Windows(R) NT 4.0 service pack 5.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: Abit BP6
CPU: 2X Intel Celeron PPGA 400Mhz
Memory: 64mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball CX 6.4Gb ATA66
IDE second channel Primary port: Crative Lab 48X CDROM drive
AGP port: ATI Rage Fury 128GL 32Mb AGP
OS: Win NT svp5
DirectX 6.0

Winbench99 CPUmark99

Leading the pack with almost 2 points better than the BE6
we can clearly see that the BP6 is a very good performer...

Winstone99

Once again, the BP6 is leading the pack way up front...

Overclocking tests

An interesting gain in performance as measured by Winstone99 when the
processors were Overclocked from 400Mhz to 500Mhz can be observed here.

Hard Disk Drives sub-system

The below evaluation table is showing the strong points and the weak points of the tested motherboard. No need to remember to you that we never buy a motherboard only for its performances. Most of today's motherboards are exhibiting performances very close to each others, so, we need additional information in order to help us distinguish what are the real advantages of a motherboard compared to the others and this is exactly where is coming into help this evaluation table.

The score obtained by this motherboard is 99 points out of 100. Once again, an Abit motherboard is coming pretty close to perfection, isn't it?

The weak points

I can't really talk about weak points here but just a couple of little things that must be improved and...after all...I had to put something here because perfection doesn't exist yet. Does it? The only weak points that I've found is that there are only 3 memory sockets while four of them would have been appreciated by several users.

The strong points

The strong points of the BP6 are so numerous that I will certainly forget to mention some but let's give it a try: The things I loved best on the PB6 are its ease of use, its excellent Overclockability, its integrated ATA66 controller and the richness of its features.

Conclusions

With the BP6, Abit is redefining the industry dual processors manufacturing. Until now, dual processors motherboards used to cost several times more than the Abit BP6 while the components to install on them were even more expensive. With the BP6, symmetric multi-processing is now a reality affordable by everyone at a cost that was out of reach a few months ago. The BP6 is not only giving to all of us the possibility to use SMP but its integrated ATA66 hard disk drive controller is giving some life to the outdated i440BX chipset while waiting for the Intel Camino chipset. All in all, the BP6 is a very fine motherboard and it clearly shows how Abit's engineers can use their imagination to create new products with a great feature richness.

For additional information, visit Abit.