Well rounded product
Written: May 20 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Economical, Flexible, Easy to install
Cons: Sound card on board isn't the greatest
|
|
|
| Newskier's Full Review: Abit VA6 |
This motherboard I found extremely easy to install, and very easy to upgrade as well. I used this to replace my aging pentium II 233 in my old Gateway system.
I took this board and had no problem adding it to my existing gateway case, or adding additional memory and components. The nicest feature of this board is it allows you to use the Celeron, Pentium II or Pentium III chips. It has a bios utility that makes it very easy to setup your CPU configuration. If you are going to be using a Celeron chip (I've got a 466 in mine) then you'll need an adaptor (the Celeron chip is based on a socket 370 while the board is designed to accomodate the PII and PIII lines under Socket 1) The adaptor is about $25 or so and is very easy to use, you just pop it into the socket 1 where your CPU would normally go.
Celerons run at 66mhz bus speed, but I'd still recommend buying yourself SDRAM that runs at 100mhz. With a celeron, you won't be running at the 100 speed, but if you decide to upgrade to a PII or PIII (as high as 733 mhz PIII) than you'll appreciate that you already have the 100mhz memory (plus, it's the same price either way as far as I know for 66 or 100 memory)
While there are only three DIMM sockets for memory, you can put up to 768MB of memory on the board (more than most people need) I've got 256 MB, and what's nice is you can have any configuration of memory chips (I've got two 64MB chips and one 128MB chip)
The board also comes with a sound card built in by VIA technologies. While it is adequate, I would recommend getting yourself a seperate sound card, as you do not need to use the one that comes attached to the board, it is only an option.
This board is very cheap (under 100 bucks) and allows quite a bit of customization, so it's a great choice for people looking for an economical and flexible board (it also supports bus speeds up to 133 mhz, but I'd stick with the 100 mhz items, they are much less expensive)
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Newskier
|
|
Location: MA
Reviews written: 57
Trusted by: 6 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.