Although the BP6 has been around for a little while now, it is still in a class of its own in terms of what it delivers. The first thing you notice about the board (and indeed the main reason you'll want one) is that it takes 2x370pin PPGA Celeron CPUs. What this basically means is that if you run an operating system that supports SMP - symmetric Multiple Processors (such as Windows NT or now Windows 2000), you can get two high powered Celeron CPUs and the motherboard for basically the same sort of price you would have paid for a decent PIII CPU. What this means is in performance terms the BP6 will blow the PIII out of the water on this sort of operating system. You do need to be careful though - because you've got two 433Mhz CPUs doesn't mean you've got the equivalent of a 866Mhz system, it actually allows the load will be spread over the two CPUs instead of just one. This is brilliant if you run several applications at the same time (and lets face it, who doesn't now?), the database compilation that would have had your system grinding to a halt and unusable for the next 20 minutes, now means that you've got a completely unused CPU available so you can carry on working. In addition if you use high end software packages that will use both processors at once then watch the system fly.

The second thing you will notice about the board is the number of connectors to plug things into. Although based around Intel's trusty BX chipset, the board supports UDMA/66 hard drives by way of an on-board Highpoint UDMA/66 controller. This means is addition to being able to use the latest hard drives at their optimum you can also plug up to eight IDE devices onto the board - four on the standard UDMA/33 controllers and four on the UDMA/66! Now you can plug back in that original 4X CD-Rom that's been knocking about for ages and you haven't got the heart to throw it away. And the Zip drive. And the CD Writer. And DVD drive. And your three hard drives. You get the idea.

Although we've just said that the BP6 is best used with on operating system that supports SMP, it doesn't mean that we can't use our trusty Windows 98. Windows will just ignore the second CPU and just run as normal with only the first one. Whilst this might seem a waste, it is still nice to be able to run Windows in its standard incarnation. Indeed, that's where we started our testing and weren't disappointed. Considering we are effectively ignoring the main advantage of the motherboard, the results are more than adequate. After setting up the CPU details in the BIOS the Windows install went through without any problems. We did however experience problems when we first tried to run our benchmarks ie crashing and generally being unstable, but we found it was our fault because we hadn't installed the UDMA66 controller drivers (duh!). After we did manage to bypass that obstacle the test went through fine and the system was absolutely stable. The Winstone result came in at 20.3, which is very respectable for a 433 Celeron system and in fact beats the Elite. This was without playing around with the BIOS so I daresay there is even more to be squeezed out if you're that way inclined........

When we loaded on Windows 2000 it was....... disappointing. After overcoming the installation problem where Win2K didn't know about the Highpoint UDMA66 on-board controller and so we had to install the driver everything seemed to be OK. Until we started testing. Could we get the motherboard to run stable? It was fine under normal use but as soon as any load was put on all sorts of weird and wonderful things started happening. In the end a trip to Highpoint's website (www.highpoint.com) and a driver upgrade for the UDMA66 controller from v1.20 which was shipped with the motherboard to version 1.22, and the system was as solid as a rock. And so the serious benchmarking began and again we were disappointed. The scores we got back were good but not as good as hoped. Having thought about it a little more, the testing we were able to do didn't really show what the motherboard is capable of, mainly because the tests were designed for single processor systems and so the second CPU was being unutilised. The Winstone result came back as 22.5 which is a nice increase over the Windows 98 scores and if that second CPU wasn't really being used - WOW. The 3D Mark 2000 results brought us straight back down to Earth however. A score of 1254 is good for a Celeron 433 but not up there with a decent speed PIII which would leave it standing. Unless you only play games when the itch gets you, this isn't the motherboard for you, but that's a limitation of the Celeron Processor rather than the Motherboard.

Conclusion

The board itself is great - a cheap way to get some real processing power for little investment. The only thing you need to be wary of is that Intel has got wise to this little goldmine (why would you have a dual PIII system, when you can have a dual Celeron system giving almost as good performance for a third of the price?) and a started locking the Celerons so they will only run as a single processor system. I have it on good authority that you are fine with everything up to a 466Mhz (we used two 433's without any problems) but may have some problems with 500s and above. I know that when the 500 first came out it wasn't locked, but like all good things this soon change. Now rumour has it that there is a way to get around the Intel restriction although it does mean tampering with the CPUs so you can kiss any warranty, and the CPU, goodbye if you get it wrong. That said, you can pick up a couple of 466s now for next to nothing and you'll end up with a system that will do pretty much anything you want for quite a while yet, with a great motherboard at the heart of it all.

Congratulations to Abit on winning one of the first ever One2surf awards !!

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