Interesting read. I had the Abit BP6 and it was a killer in performance/price. The problem I had with it wasn't the capacitors but rather that the PCB itself was a bit thin to support 2x CPUs/fans.
Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.
They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though).
Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot.
So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard.
The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
EDO was from the 2nd generation of Pentium. It was not a 486 thing and I never even heard of any 486 that could use EDO.
The 1st gen Pentium chips were 5V parts running at 60 MHz or 66 MHz.
The 2nd gen were 3.3V and ran at 75, 90 or 100 MHz.
The critical development for EDO was Intel's Triton chipset (the 82430FX) which added EDO support for about 15% more memory bandwidth.
I ran the testing labs for PC Pro magazine at that time and Tulip Computers of the Netherlands sent in a Pentium with an SIS chipset that could detect EDO but not use EDO's timings, so it was no quicker. I wrote about it.
(This was circa 1995. 486 introduced 1989. P5 (5V) 1993. P54C (3.3V) 1994.)
Tulip threatened to sue. The board and some lawyers flew to London. I demonstrated that their PC could detect EDO and showed a message that EDO was fitted which did not appear if FP-mode DRAM was.
I then showed that a machine with a 430FX chipset was circa 15% quicker with EDO than FP RAM, and the Tulip was the same speed.
The threat of litigation was withdrawn and Tulip used our phone to make an international call to Taiwan there and then to shout at SIS.
I worked extensively with this stuff.
No 486s with EDO to the best of my expert knowledge.
Ah, I kept that BP6 for 10 years before selling it.
It meant I could write multithreaded concurrent software and run it at home with LinuxThreads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads) then NPTL (native Posix threading lib).
Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though!
A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!
Ah, I remember scheming about buying an NF7-S + an Athlon XP Barton and unlocking it, combining it with a geforce 4 ti4200 and overclocking both but not even having enough of the pocket change to pull that off. By the time I was far enough along to have some of that in school, I picked up an A64 and a top of the line Geforce 5 from a black friday sale and had a great time gaming and coding.
Ironically, all the scheming I did about overclocking ended up being very unnecessary and I found it borderline impossible to actually stress the upper limits of the machine's muscle with day to day workloads and so all the research I put into overclocking was not really practically necessary, that it was freeing to not have to even think about the machine and instead focus on the work I wanted to do with the software I was using and building. Surely a lesson that continues to pay dividends, albeit from simpler times...
This brings me back. My first DIY PC used an Abit motherboard. It was a great computer and was still functional after 5 years before I upgraded. I never knew about the poor quality capacitors. I guess I lucked out.
> Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink.
(Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99)
The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).
Ah, the pre-Amazon days of checking dozens of online retailers for the best prices. And seeking out the ones with specific batches of CPUs known to overlock well…
The Abit BP6 taught me so much about multithreaded programming. Programs that previously worked fine crashed instantly due to incorrect locking. It really forced me to think differently about concurrent programs.
After that I never found multithreaded programming particularly difficult. Challenging at times yes, but thanks to my newfound mental model not difficult.
I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive.
Had the motherboard for many years as a homelab server.
I bought a few more Abit boards after that, but the capacitor plague made me switch to Asus IIRC, and then they folded.
But the BP6 will forever be with me as a incredibly cool motherboard that did something unique in the consumer space.
Nice, I worked at one of those mom and pop computer shops in the late 90's. I built the computers, and I even went with my boss (the shop owner) to those shows a couple times. From what I remember, the show scene was pretty well declining at that point, at least in our area. I still remember the TV ads, though. "SUPER VGA! CD-ROM!!"
Brings back memories of late nights trying to reverse engineer the Abit uGuru chip. Triggered by not being able to read the sensors in Linux while trying to overclock my computer into being less of a shit computer.
Reverse engineering was successful but the computer never got any better. Still, fun and educating times it was!
Interesting read. I had the KR7A-133R motherboard as it won Anandtech's gold award for the best 4 bank DIMM support. It was $200 IIRC and was one the more expensive boards. Paired it with an Athlon XP 1800+ and Radeon 8500. Funny enough the AMD naming at the time was to reflect how Athlon's lower clock speed (1.5GHz) was a competitor to Intel CPU's (1.8GHz).
Asus was a strong competitor even then and I remember buying one just a few years before the Abit board that supported SD-RAM as well as DDR as a way to ease the transition for consumers.
It was a good time when IRC, AIM, and physical electronics shopping was still a thing. The only big tech presence that techies hated was Microsoft. Sigh.
What a story. This brings back memories and ties directly into my life.
In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest.
Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade.
Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.
An Abit AV8 was my first "Good" new motherboard. I came into some money and decided to build a then-new Socket 939 setup, with a 3200+.
I recall they had one BIOS release that bricked boards, which I missed by not downloading it the first day of availability. The board was eventually destroyed by a sketchy PSU which killed the AGP slot and the Geforce 6800LE that was in it.
Later I tried an IP35-E, but had problems (two different memory sets failed) so I returned it for the Gigabyte P35-DS3L I actually wanted but was out of stock at the time.
Their Ultra series motherborads were legendary for the time. Namely AN7-Ultra for AthlonXP and AN8-Ultra for AMD64.
Besides being able to overclock anything to its absolute limits, they have repurposed a keyboard microcontroller to monitor temperatures, fans and voltages on the board (aka uGuru), providing unparalleled flexibility and reliability when no other company was able to provide at that time, and after them.
Setting fan curves for temperature response was great and allowed me to run AthlonXP at 2200Mhz (200x11@1T) without excessive noise for normal tasks.
Their AN8 Ultra provided a rock solid foundation for my AMD64 system, too.
None of my capacitors have leaked/bulged despite using systems under relatively heavy load.
28 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] threadAnd 2 celerons were cheaper than a CPU with double the performance?
Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.
They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though).
Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot.
So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard.
The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
EDO was from the 2nd generation of Pentium. It was not a 486 thing and I never even heard of any 486 that could use EDO.
The 1st gen Pentium chips were 5V parts running at 60 MHz or 66 MHz.
The 2nd gen were 3.3V and ran at 75, 90 or 100 MHz.
The critical development for EDO was Intel's Triton chipset (the 82430FX) which added EDO support for about 15% more memory bandwidth.
I ran the testing labs for PC Pro magazine at that time and Tulip Computers of the Netherlands sent in a Pentium with an SIS chipset that could detect EDO but not use EDO's timings, so it was no quicker. I wrote about it.
(This was circa 1995. 486 introduced 1989. P5 (5V) 1993. P54C (3.3V) 1994.)
Tulip threatened to sue. The board and some lawyers flew to London. I demonstrated that their PC could detect EDO and showed a message that EDO was fitted which did not appear if FP-mode DRAM was.
I then showed that a machine with a 430FX chipset was circa 15% quicker with EDO than FP RAM, and the Tulip was the same speed.
The threat of litigation was withdrawn and Tulip used our phone to make an international call to Taiwan there and then to shout at SIS.
I worked extensively with this stuff.
No 486s with EDO to the best of my expert knowledge.
Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though!
Good times!
Ironically, all the scheming I did about overclocking ended up being very unnecessary and I found it borderline impossible to actually stress the upper limits of the machine's muscle with day to day workloads and so all the research I put into overclocking was not really practically necessary, that it was freeing to not have to even think about the machine and instead focus on the work I wanted to do with the software I was using and building. Surely a lesson that continues to pay dividends, albeit from simpler times...
https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/
That page includes pricing info for each component, and how I bought it. For example:
> Abit BP6 Dual PPGA Socket-370 motherboard, UDMA-66, 2 ISA, 5 PCI, AGP 2X, 3 168-pin PC100 ECC, max. 1GB RAM. Retail version. (Essential Computing $120 + $14.25 UPS Ground + $3.60 insurance = $137.95)
> Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink. (Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99)
The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).
I like they show schematics in their materials and still have a sticker from an old celeron build. I booted it up recently and it still works.
After that I never found multithreaded programming particularly difficult. Challenging at times yes, but thanks to my newfound mental model not difficult.
I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive.
Had the motherboard for many years as a homelab server.
I bought a few more Abit boards after that, but the capacitor plague made me switch to Asus IIRC, and then they folded.
But the BP6 will forever be with me as a incredibly cool motherboard that did something unique in the consumer space.
[1]: https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html (except brass finish)
Good memories.
I remember being surprised that HP did not make the boards themselves.
Asus was a strong competitor even then and I remember buying one just a few years before the Abit board that supported SD-RAM as well as DDR as a way to ease the transition for consumers.
It was a good time when IRC, AIM, and physical electronics shopping was still a thing. The only big tech presence that techies hated was Microsoft. Sigh.
EDIT: Their website is still around! https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_deta...
In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest.
Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade.
Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.
https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE
I recall they had one BIOS release that bricked boards, which I missed by not downloading it the first day of availability. The board was eventually destroyed by a sketchy PSU which killed the AGP slot and the Geforce 6800LE that was in it.
Later I tried an IP35-E, but had problems (two different memory sets failed) so I returned it for the Gigabyte P35-DS3L I actually wanted but was out of stock at the time.
Besides being able to overclock anything to its absolute limits, they have repurposed a keyboard microcontroller to monitor temperatures, fans and voltages on the board (aka uGuru), providing unparalleled flexibility and reliability when no other company was able to provide at that time, and after them.
Setting fan curves for temperature response was great and allowed me to run AthlonXP at 2200Mhz (200x11@1T) without excessive noise for normal tasks.
Their AN8 Ultra provided a rock solid foundation for my AMD64 system, too.
None of my capacitors have leaked/bulged despite using systems under relatively heavy load.