VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A Motherboard Roundup - February 2000

The performance of the boards that managed to complete the tests didn't vary much from one board to the next. This is what you'd expect from most motherboards, but as the following tests illustrated you sometimes have to expect the unexpected.

The ECS P6BAP-Me failed to complete our Winstone runs because it, being a Socket-370 only solution (thus requiring us to use a 550E known to be able to be overclocked to 733MHz) needed a boost in the core voltage in order to hit the higher clock speed (1.65v vs 1.60v). Unfortunately the board does not support the ability to tweak the core voltage of any CPU, which resulting in our 550E not being quite as stable as we'd like it to be at 733MHz and it definitely didn't help the system complete Winstone 2000.

The VA6 failed the test because of a problem with our VA6 board, we have mentioned this to ABIT but we have yet to see an updated revision from the company. There are many satisfied VA6 users out there but at the same time there are other users that have had similar experiences to ours with the VA6 where the board would not even complete a single test under Windows. We are still awaiting an updated revision of the motherboard from ABIT.