Bill J McMilleon wrote:

> I have just heard of the Abit BP-6 board which is a dual Celeron
> motherboard.
> Is anyone out there using this board? And how do you have it configured
> (type of video card, amount of RAM, etc)? Most importantly, how do you
> rate the performance?

I like Abit boards, have one IT5H rev. 2, a BX6 rev.2, and a BP6.

What's wrong with the previous sentence? Two of the boards are rev. 2., the
BP6 will most likely be revised as well, wait if you can. I'm not unhappy
with it, just concerned, mine died yesterday. Very short life, 7/9-8/4.

I got a new case for it, took it out of the cae it was in and put it in the
other, turned the switch, nada. First thought was bad PS on the new case,
not so. After going through the numbers all left was CPUs or motherboard. I
thought I had fried the CPUs, but that's really unlikely. Tried new CPUs
this morning and only the fans and hard drive would come on, dead board.
Maybe I fried it while transferring it from one case to the other but ESD
is close to impossible where I live, too humid. Maybe the heat fried it,
who knows. Day before it died it only recognized one CPU at boot up so I'm
thinking the board was flaky to begin with.

Things worked out rather nicely though. The vendor is out of stock so
they'll refund my money and the return shipping, and I found a place that
sells the board locally and picked up another one today for less money, I
would have waited but the warranty on the CPUs is ticking <g>.

The new board is already better than the other I had. I noticed the SN is
way higher than my first one, high enough in production that a needed
change has been made to the socket. The first one had a metal lever and it
was not flushed with the socket so it would be in the way of an oversized
heatsink.  The new one has a plastic lever and is flush with the socket.
The capacitors are still to close to the socket in my opinion, the Vantech
coolers heatsink touches the capacitors on top so I don't recommend it. The
Global Win coolers leave enough clearance but I would like a little more
room.

Asides from that, the board rocks!! I ran two 300s at 450 and 495. I'm now
running 366s at 550 and will not try to get more out of it unless it does
it at default voltage,  I think running one of the chips at 2.2 might have
had something to do with the early death of my first board, these boards
are just to new. Another thing I noticed is that CPU 1 and Fan 1 are
actually CPU 2 and Fan 2, the numbers are reversed. Maybe a BIOS upgrade
will correct this but there's none out yet.

The 366s chips are running cooler than the 300s, even at the higher speed.
I think it's because the slug is actually flat, on all the 300 Celerons I
have worked with, even boxed ones, the corners of the slug are higher than
the center so there's a big gap like a valley that keeps it from making a
good contact with the heatsink. The 366s I got now are flat against the
heatsink so the heat transfer is better. Not all of them are like that
though, an earlier 366 I worked with was just like the 300s, I guess the
newer chips are the better ones.

HTH,

Jose

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