Second Look at VP6

Second Look at the VP6
by: MTP

I've had my VP6 for several months now and really haven't run into many problems that weren't easily fixed or was caused by the hardware (most were from me).
I have been very busy lately and therefore have sorta neglected the system and just had it running silently in the corner 24/7 crunching RC5 and Genome@Home. It was time for a fresh start.

Filling the slots:
First off you will notice that the board is laid out fairly nice: 1 AGP, 5 PCI, 2 USB with a connector for 2 more, WOL, etc. The power connector is on the top and out of the way, IDE and floppy connectors on the right side, fan headers next to sockets. However, Abit went a few extra inches and ensured that fan headers could handle higher amperage fans, so now your FOP38s, Alphas, and Swift-tecs will run off the motherboard without smoking the fan headers. Nice touch. The third fan header is placed on the bottom right of the board near where the front of the case is making it usable as a case fan, another nice touch.
I have changed out some of the hardware since this system is going from "test unit" to "main machine". I don't have the most elaborate hardware in it, nor have I set up a raid on it. That will come when then funds to buy all the extra hard-drives does.
You also must be careful to the placement of your hardware in the PCI slots due to the IRQ sharing. Several slots share IRQs with each other and several share with other built in hardware on the motherboard.
The sharing is laid out in the user manual and here. You'll notice that slot 1 shares with the AGP slot, slot 4 shares with the USB controller, and slot 5 shares with the HPT370 controller.

This is how my VP6 is loaded out.
VP6 Rev 1.0, bios version WK
2 x PIII700E cb0, SL45Y Malaysia wk16
2 x 128M PC166 Tonicom SDRAM
Elsa Gladiak GF2 MX video card
SBLive Value in pci slot 4
Netgear 10/100 nic in pci slot 2
10G Seagate ATA100 hdd on ide 2
40x cdrom on ide 1

Now you'll notice that I have placed a card in a slot that shares IRQ with the USB. I don't have any USB hardware so that didn't bother me. I've also made the CD-ROM the master on IDE1, as per the user manual. This is due to the cdrom sometimes disappears if it is on ide2 after the 4in1 drivers are loaded.

Now adding heat-sinks can be a little tricky on this motherboard. There are numerous surface mount components around the cpu sockets which are easily ripped off with the heat-sinks clips. I read more than one person doing this with lots of different types of heat-sinks. The easiest solution was placing a strip of electrical tape along the socket edges, and beind careful when installing the heat-sinks. I am currently using Swiftech M370-0A heat-sinks and they work excellent

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