Overview

The Abit BP6

Note: New beta drivers for the BP6 are available from FiringSquad!

Abit's illustrious past

What gamer doesn't know the motherboard company Abit? Their release of the original BX6 and BH6 motherboards took the community by storm. Due to their rich feature sets and highly acclaimed SoftMenu technology, they became instant favorites in the gaming and overclocking world, especially with overclocking becoming very mainstream. The re-release of the BX6, as the revision 2 version, was very highly received as well. Finally, the BM6 and ZM6 socket-370 boards seemed to round out Abit's line of motherboards very nicely. What's left?

Back on the scene

Unwilling to sit back and wait around, Abit is back twofold. Their latest motherboard, appropriately christened in the B_6 nomenclature, is titled the BP6. What could Abit possibly do to improve their current models? Well, after the release of socket-370 Celerons, and the realization by the public that the Celeron of new was a far cry better than the Celeron of before, motherboard manufacturers began to show very solid support for this new CPU interface. Socket-370 boards were manufactured, and socket-to-slot adapters, called slockets, were made to make the new Celerons compatible with existing motherboards.

Performance x2

A while back, we undertook a unique experiment. We took two slockets and modified them so they would work in a multiprocessor environment. Granted, it was not the easiest of conversions due to some tricky soldering, but the point was to illustrate that Celerons could in fact perform well in a multiprocessor environment. This fact encouraged manufacturers to release slockets that were already modified for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) use. While this was ok, it was an extra step having the slocket as a middleman. Abit eliminated that step by creating the BP6, the first socket-370 Celeron motherboard that eliminates the need for slocket adapters!

After hearing that a small number (several hundred) were already available on the market in the US, FiringSquad was able to actually call a few vendors and get a shipping version into our labs. Abit wasn't exactly happy to hear about that, but Steve was kind enough to provide tech support and updated drivers for us once he verifed that we had the board. Widespread distribution will begin on or about June 28th, 1999, so you should be seeing the BP6 by early to mid July. Until then, we've got the world's first review of Abit's Socket-370 wonderboard, the BP6!