Written: 5/28/2000
Written by: MotoŽ
Price: $99.95US
Manufactured by: Abit

The Abit VT6X4 is Abit's second attempt at a VIA chipset based motherboard. The first one Abit made, the VA6, was based on the older Apollo 133 chipset. The VT6X4 is based on the newer ApolloPro 133A chipset. The 133A chipset has quite a few advantages over the 133 chipset, chief among them being the ability to control RAM speed independent of system bus speed.

The VT6X4 has a fairly small footprint. The board is no bigger than that of a BE6-II. You shouldn't have any problem getting this motherboard to install into any size case.  The layout of the VT6X4 is done very well. There is lots of space between the CPU slot and the first DIMM slot to accommodate big CPU coolers without blocking off any DIMMs.

One thing I found unusual about the VT6X4 was that it uses an older BIOS. There is no SoftMenu III. Another thing that seems uncharacteristic of Abit was the selection of front side bus speed. The VT6X4 offers the following:  150, 140, 133, 124, 120, 115, 110, 105, 100, 83, 75, and 66.  While this seems like a nice selection, it's kinda disappointing compared to the SoftMenu III powered BE6-II, which has bus speeds from 83 all the way to 200Mhz in 1Mhz steps. It's ashamed that Abit chose to make the maximum bus speed 150Mhz. I would have like to see it go to at least 160Mhz.

The Abit VT6X4 is designed to get the most speed out of your Coppermine CPU. As you know, I've been using a VT6X4 to run my Copper 550 at 825Mhz (150x5.5). This is something that can not be done with a BX chipset motherboard like the BE6-II. The reason the VT6X4 can do this is because of the 1/2 AGP divider. BX chipset motherboards like the BE6-II uses a 2/3 AGP divider.

AGP video cards like the Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 GTS is meant to run on a 66Mhz AGP bus. When running your system on the stock 100Mhz FSB the AGP bus runs at 2/3 of that speed (66Mhz). The problem comes when you increase the FSB. By going to 150Mhz, the AGP bus increases to 100Mhz (2/3 of 150 = 100Mhz). A 100Mhz AGP bus is way too high for my GeForce2 GTS video card. However using that 1/2 AGP divider of the VT4X4 gives me an AGP bus speed of 75Mhz (1/2 of 150 = 75Mhz). This is well within the operating limits of every AGP video card. This is why I wish Abit could have included a 160Mhz bus. At that speed, AGP bus speed would be 80Mhz. Still within the limits of most AGP video cards.

Another nice feature the VT6X4 has is the ability to increase or decrease the RAM speed by 33Mhz. This little feature could be the difference between a stable overclock and failure. Seeing that most PC-133 RAM can't handle a 150Mhz bus speed, all you need to do is go into the Abit BIOS and reduce the RAM speed by 33Mhz. Now the RAM is running at just 117Mhz, no problem for PC133 RAM or even good quality PC-100 RAM.   This works the other way too. If you're running at Celeron 366 at 100Mhz FSB to get 550Mhz and you're using PC-133 RAM, you're not getting the full use of the RAM. With the VT6X4 you can go into the BIOS and increase the RAM speed by 33Mhz. Now your PC-133 is doing what it was designed to do, run at 133Mhz, while your FSB remains at 100Mhz.

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