Chaintech 6AIA VIA Apollo Pro Plus microATX Socket-370

The Bad

We've shown before that VIA Apollo Pro Plus based boards are slower than their Intel counterparts. However, the 6AIA is not even up to par with other Apollo Pro Plus boards. There is also the issue of VIA's AGP compatibility, which was one of the biggest problems with their MVP3 chipset. While things have improved considerably with the Apollo Pro Plus, the question of what will happen in the future remains. Will VIA have to constantly write a new AGP GART driver as new video cards are released? Only time will tell.

Since this board is also intended to harbor the i440ZX chipset, only 2 DIMM slots are available and memory expansion could become an issue. Make sure you buy as much RAM as you can the first time - you'll only have one shot to upgrade without throwing away some old RAM.

Voltage tweaking is finally coming around from other manufacturers besides Abit. Unfortunately, that does not include Chaintech on the 6AIA.

As mentioned above, hardware monitoring is absent and not available on the 6AIA. This is fairly rare these days, but was most likely cut out to lower the cost just a bit further.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com