BP6: good idea, but not for everyone
Written: Sep 14 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent performance for some applications
Cons: Problematical UDMA66 support, and not quite as great performance on many applications
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| alan's Full Review: Abit BP6 Motherboard |
Summary: I'm really happy with my purchase, but the BP6 is not for everybody.
The BP6 is a really interesting motherboard because it allows the use of two Celeron processors at the same time (assuming your OS supports it, only WinNT, Win2k, Linux, and BeOS do). The issue is that two 400mhz celeron's do not perform like one 800 megahertz celeron, rather, the performance improvement is only significant under certain applications. On the other hand, considering how much celeron processors cost, if you run the right sort of applications, nothing can beat the performance to cost ratio of this board.
Things that will be faster:
* Multiple applications running at the same time - whenever you have two applications (or more) that are running at the same time, they get split between two processors, and everything really flys. If you have a broadband connection and like to surf the web with many browsers open, for instance, everything remains snappy on this board. Also if one application crashes, and consumes all your CPU time, the other processor is free, making it really easy to open task manager and kill the offending application.
* Applications optimized for multiple CPUs (Quake 3, Adobe products, some 3D modeling and rendering programs).
Things that do not get faster (by that much, anyway):
Boot-up, application startup time, programs not written to support multiple processors, most games.
As a cognitive scientist investigating computational evolution and artificial life, I can write my research software to support multiple CPUs, and get huge speedups (nearly 2x), but for most of the prewritten software on my machine, the dual CPUs doesn't add that much.
On the other hand, with celeron's costing so little, and the cost of the BP6 roughly the same as other good celeron MBs, it's hard to resist, even if a lot of today's software doesn't make good use of a dual CPU system. I'll questimate that having two CPU's speeds up everything by about 10-20%, which is pretty worth it, considering the price.
A few words about the BP6 as a motherboard: It has a nice layout, a nice BIOS, and lots of options for over-clocking. I've run BeOS, Linux, and Windows 2K on it, and all have performed quite well, with one exception. The board has a built in UDMA66 controller, and not all alternative OS's support it. However, the BX chipset has a UDMA33 controller, which you can use instead that works great. Also, the current Win2K drivers for the UDMA66 controller are buggy, so right now I have to use the UDMA33 controller to keep the machine stable. That may just be a problem for owners of the IBM deskstar Hard Drive line, and Abit/HiPoint are working on a bug fix as I write this. It does cause a performance hit to use UDMA33, but on the other hand, Win2k is amazingly stable in this configuration (almost as good as Linux).
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
alan
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Member: Alan Robinson
Location: La Jolla, CA
Reviews written: 63
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Cognitive Science PhD student, UC San Diego.
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