Let's try to ask ourselves a question: what do we actually want from a today's mainboard? Of course, high stability,reliability and super fast performance. Besides, we would also claim that it supports all latest technologies, protocolsand modes. Here we should mention the support of all modern processors including Intel Pentium III built on Coppermine core,fast PC133 SDRAM or RDRAM, new AGP 4x mode and the support of the already widely spread UltraDMA/66 protocol. And since it isthe chipset that forms all the versatile mainboard features, then our ultimate claim will sound as follows: "a modern mainboardshould be based on modern core logic".

If we agree not to consider all integrated solutions, then we will find only two modern chipsets in the today'smarket: Intel 820 supporting expensive RDRAM and VIA Apollo Pro133A with similar features, which works with PC133SDRAM. If we recall the entire relatively long-lasting competition between Intel and VIA in the chipset market, wewill have every reason to admit that Intel has always been the gainer. In the first place Intel owes its success tohigher stability and better performance shown by mainboards based on its logic. However, time flows without stoppingand VIA engineers never keep their hands in pockets. They have thoroughly worked on improving their chipsets lately.As for Intel, the launching of i820 supporting RDRAM undermined its positions in the market quite significantly,because the human common sense did not allow spending so much money on memory with rather doubtful advantages. Thatis why the use of additional MTH appeared the major solution for mainboards on i820. This MTH was responsible fortranslating requests submitted via Rambus channel into those for PC100 SDRAM, which resulted into tangible performanceworsening of i820 based systems with SDRAM compared to the good old i440BX, for instance.

In this respect i820 based mainboards with SDRAM as well as those on VIA Apollo Pro133A are really worth discussing.So, we are going to review particularly these mainboards in the near future. The first product, which we decided tointroduce to you, belongs to a very famous Taiwanese company - Chaintech, being one of the ten world's largest mainboardmanufacturers. It is Chaintech 6ATA4 on VIA Apollo Pro133A. The previous product from Chaintech on VIA Apollo Pro133chipset, 6ATA2, approved itself a highly stable and reliable board, showed high performance and good processoroverclockability. Well, let's find out if its successor - Chaintech 6ATA4 - is as good as its elder fellow.

Specification

• CPU
  • Supports Slot 1 Intel Pentium II/III processors working at the frequencies up to 750MHz
  • Supports processors with 66, 100 and 133MHz FSB
• Chipset
  • VIA Apollo Pro133A Chipset (694X+686A)
• System Memory
  • 3 x 168-pin 3.3V DIMM slots support max 768MB PC100/133 and VCM SDRAM
  • ECC Support
• AGP
  • AGP slot supports 1x/2x/4x mode
• Slots
  • 5 PCI, 1 ISA and 1 AMR slot
• BIOS
  • Award BIOS supporting ACPI, DMI, Green, PnP and Trend ChipAway Virus
  • SeePU technology for jumperless CPU installation
  • Built-in BIOS flashing utility
  • Optional TWINBIOS technology
• Integrated IDE controller
  • Supports PIO Mode 4 and Multi-word DMA Mode 2
  • 2 Ultra DMA66 Bus Master IDE channels (supporting up to 4 ATAPI-devices)
• Integrated Audio
  • Integrated AC'97 v2.1 codec
  • Optional Creative 5880 sound chip
• Onboard I/O colored according to PC99 specification
  • 2 USB ports + an additional connector for another 2 USB ports
  • 2 serial and 1 parallel ports supporting ECP and EPP
  • PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse
  • 1 Game/MIDI port, line in/out/microphone in-jacks
• Other
  • Integrated hardware monitoring
  • Wake on LAN/modem/mouse/keyboard/timer
• Board Dimensions
  • ATX Form Factor, 20.0cm x 30.5cm

The mainboard is supplied in an ordinary Chaintech box. The package contains UltraDMA/66 cable, a cable for FDD, a quitedetailed user's manual and some software, which we would like to discuss separately.

Last year Chaintech became one of the first mainboard manufacturers, who accompanied its products with some rather usefulcommercial software including Norton Ghost and Norton Antivirus. This bundle called AIRBAG continued developing with 6ATA4mainboard and turned into AIRBAG2000. Now besides the listed utilities and necessary drivers it also includes SeePU2000(processor parameters control and setting from Windows) and Shepherd2000 (hardware monitoring utility).

Closer Look

As we have already mentioned above, Chaintech 6ATA4 supports many today's technologies such as 133MHz processor bus,AGP 4x, UltraDMA/66. Of course, this mainboard also supports all modern Slot 1 processors (Socket370 processors can beused via Slot 1-to-Socket370 converter) including Intel Pentium III on the Coppermine core. It is possible because thevoltage regulator of this board corresponds to VRM 8.4 spec. However, besides that, 6ATA4 can boast another useful feature:its system bus frequency can be equal to 66MHz, which is required for Intel Celeron. This is especially pleasant since most i820based boards, such as the recently reviewed ASUS P3C2000, as a rule, don't support Celeron.

There are three slots for DIMM modules on the mainboard, which allow Chaintech 6ATA4 to work with 768MB memory altogether.As any other mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset, 6ATA4 supports PC100 as well as PC133 SDRAM. This chipset has anasynchronous memory bus, which can work at the CPU frequency as well as at the frequency 33MHz higher/lower than that.Therefore if you have a processor requiring a 133MHz FSB you do not necessarily need PC133 SDRAM. You can easily do withPC100 SDRAM in this case. The same thing occurs with processors requiring 100MHz FSB: you can clock the memory bus to133MHz and hence increase the overall system performance. Speaking about memory, we have to point out that it alsosupports such exotic memory as VCM SDRAM, which is a buffered multichannel PC133 SDRAM modification now manufactured onlyby NEC.

Chaintech 6ATA4 features the most typical for today amount of slots - 5 PCI, 1 ISA, 1 AGP and 1 AMR. However, AMRslot is located in a rather strange place - between ISA and PCI, so that ISA and AMR slots turn out shared. In other words, ifyou install an AMR card you won't be able to install any ISA cards any more. In fact, it is not an awful drawback, becauseAMR-modems are still rather rare and ISA cards - atavistic. AGP-slot is designed as a universal 1x/2x/4x slot supportingall sorts of AGP graphics cards. All the slots, except ISA, allow installing full-size expansion cards.

All in all, Chaintech 6ATA4 design and layout make a rather favorable impression. Especially positive effect has the correctlocation of power supply connector, which meets the ATX specification but is very rarely used by most mainboard manufacturers.It is placed in the lower right corner of the board near IDE and FDD connectors. That is why nothing lies in the way and thecable gets easily from the power supply unit to the board. Behind Slot 1 you can see 11 capacitors of 1200uF each (which is abit better than the usual fewer than 10 capacitors of 1000uF). A lot of smaller capacitors are spilt all over the board. Thisis another indirect evidence for its high stability, which we once again proved with the benchmarks. However, the design isnot ideal and is not deprived of small slips. In particular, a graphics card installed into AGP-slot will prevent you fromreplacing the DIMM modules by blocking the clips of the memory slots. You will be simply unable to open them. The seconddrawback is the inconvenient location of a special connector for the third and fourth USB ports: almost in the center ofthe board. It means that in case these two additional USB connectors are installed, there will be one more cable hangingawkwardly inside the case.

Since there are only 3 DIMM slots and they are located very close to the chipset and to the processor slot, the engineersmanaged to make a not very wide PCB that is why 6ATA4 can fit easily in any ATX case.

The integrated sound, which has already become an integral part of the today's mainboards can be implemented on Chaintech6ATA4 in two different ways. You get either AC'97 software sound or an integrated Creative 5880 microchip. In the first caseyou will lose about 5-10% of the CPU performance during playback, and in the second case you will have to pay a few bucks more for themainboard.

A few innovations were made in BIOS of 6ATA4 based on Award BIOS ver. 6.0. The first thing made was TWINBIOS technologysimilar to DualBIOS from Gigabyte, which we have already discussed in detail in Gigabyte GA-BX2000 Review. In brief, themain idea of this technology looks as follows. The mainboard is equipped with two BIOS microchips and if the content ofone of them gets spoilt, the second chip comes to rescue: you simply reflash your spoilt BIOS with a spare one. Thisallows to avoid blackouts during BIOS reflashing and to protect your system against such viruses as CIH. However, takinginto account that an additional Flash-memory microchip makes the product more expensive, Chaintech decided to do a veryclever thing: they equipped their mainboards only with a socket for the second microchip. And the second microchip itself wasoptional. In other words, if you have to maintain several PCs assembled on Chaintech 6ATA4 mainboards, you will need justone BIOS copy for all of them.

The second innovation connected with BIOS, is a special AwardFlash utility to update BIOS in ROM. You can run itwhen starting your system. All it needs to work properly is a diskette with a new BIOS version on it. The main advantageof this approach is the possibility to prevent the user from spoiling the Flash memory content when using some wrongflashing software as well as to simplify BIOS update operations.

BIOS settings hardly deserve any reproach. As usual, mainboards on VIA chipsets can boast beautiful opportunitiesfor memory timings and PCI and AGP buses configuring. Like on all the previously tested Chaintech mainboards, on 6ATA4IRQs can be manually assigned to PCI slots. The only function, BIOS Setup really lacks and we wish it were available isthe possibility to enable AGP Fast Writes, which is disabled as default. This mode allows the system CPU to transfer thedata directly to the graphics bus avoiding the system bus. However, now Fast Writes is supported only by NVIDIA GeForce256 and its realization in this chip causes noticeable performance drops that's why there is no need in it for a while.

Hardware monitoring of Chaintech 6ATA4 uses South Bridge VT82C686A feature. It controls 2 temperatures, 2 fan rotationspeeds of the 3 coolers connected to the board and 5 voltages. The chipset features do not allow monitoring too manysensors that is why there can be only more 1 temperature sensor added to the already existing. One of the temperaturesensors is situated inside the chipset South Bridge. The second one, traditional for Chaintech, is made as a "tail"under the processor heatsink and has a thermistor at the end, which measures the CPU temperature. Unfortunately,Chaintech failed to make use of a special thermal diode integrated into the processor core, although they could have done it.That is why you should regard the processor temperature on 6ATA4 with a bit of skepticism.

The connectors of Chaintech 6ATA4 are colored according to PC99 specification. The board also has a jointedprocessor retention mechanism supporting all types of cartridges. Besides, there are two LEDs: one indicates thepresence of the required power voltage and the other lights when DIMM slots are powered.

Overclocking

On Chaintech 6ATA4 all CPU parameters are configured with the help of a brand SeePU technology, which allowschanging the processor clock multiplier and system bus frequency directly from BIOS Setup. However,there are serious restrictions. First, changing the CPU clock multiplier doesn't make any sense, because it is lockedin the processor and this setting has no desired effect. As for the FSB frequency, you can actually overclock it fromBIOS Setup only relative to the nominal values such as 66/100/133MHz, which are set with the jumpers. It implies that ifyou set the jumpers to get 66MHz, you will be able to change the FSB frequency through BIOS Setup only within 66-100MHz.If you set 100MHZ, then the allowed range moves to 100-133MHz, and with 133MHz nominal FSB you will be able to overclockto over 133MHz. So, despite the fact that Chaintech claims to have jumperless CPU configuring, in reality it is only 50%jumperless.

The frequency range supported by 6ATA4 is quite impressive: 66, 75, 83MHz and the whole interval between 100 and 160MHzwith 1MHz step. This diversity appears possible due to the programmable clock generator Realtek RTM520-39D, which should bealready familiar to you from ABIT mainboards such as BE6-II and BF6. Although 6ATA4 allows setting 64 differentprocessor bus frequencies, nevertheless it is still a significant drawback that there are not so many values available below 100MHz,which may negatively tell Intel Celeron overclocking.

Besides, Chaintech 6ATA4 allows increasing Vcore by 0.1 or 0.2V relative to the nominal. This function isvery useful for overclocking in the first place. It makes the CPU working at higher frequencies more stable. Besides that,on the mainboard there is also a special jumper (VTT+), which serves to increase the GTL+ bus voltage by 0.1V, which mayalso help to stabilize the overclocked system.

But nevertheless, in terms of overclocking the official support of 133MHz bus and the possibility to change the memorybus frequency independently from the FSB frequency are the main advantages of 6ATA4, as well as of any other mainboard onVIA Apollo Pro133A. The first thing means that if you set the FSB frequency equal to 133MHz, AGP of 6ATA4, unlike i440BXbased boards, will get the required 66MHz instead of 89MHz, which a great number of graphics cards do not support. Theasynchronous memory bus allows working at 100MHz even if the FSB is set to 133MHz, which is very important in case yoursystem is equipped with the old PC100 memory.

And now let's pass over to practice. To check the overclockability of Chaintech 6ATA4, we tried to overclock IntelPentium III 500E. The system was equipped with PC133 SDRAM and a graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce 256. When we overclockedthis processor in the system with i440BX based mainboard, the maximum we managed to get from the system bus was 133MHz(with the processor running at 667MHz). All our further attempts to increase the FSB frequency ended in failure: thesystem crashed because of the exceedingly overclocked AGP, which prevented the graphics cards from performing properly.Well, this problem of i440BX, which allows only 1 and 2/3 AGP dividers, has always been well-known. VIA Apollo Pro133Abased mainboards, including 6ATA4, use 1/2 to get the AGP frequency from 133MHz FSB and hence guarantee proper operationof this bus. The effect didn't keep us waiting for long: we managed to overclock the CPU up to 155MHz FSB (775MHz).

The tests carried out for 750MHz CPU frequency showed that the system was quite stable. So the maximum FSB frequency -160MHz - is no longer so unattainable.

However, despite such high results, we still failed to avoid trouble. It turned out that if the FSB lied in the interval120-132MHz, Chaintech 6ATA4 didn't work. What was the matter? As usual, the answer was unbelievably simple: in this FSBinterval Chaintech 6ATA4 used 2/3 AGP divider - the same problem we had with i440BX. However, since there was AGP 4x, thisproblem cropped up a bit earlier on 6ATA4. And only starting from 133MHz, when AGP divider turned to 1/2, the system startedworking properly. By the way, the similar thing may happen if you set your FSB to 83MHz. So, we have just revealed one moredrawback of Chaintech 6ATA4: no way to set AGP and PCI dividers manually.

Luckily, we can help you with this problem. The solution we suggest is a special CPUBoost utility, which allows directlyoperating Realtek RTM520-39D clock generator (by the way, this utility will work not only with Chaintech6ATA4, but also with Chaintech 6ATA2, ABIT BE6-II, ABIT BF6). Of course, this program won't require any jumper settings onthe mainboard. That is why having set the jumpers responsible for 66/100/133MHz FSB into a position corresponding to thedivider you choose, namely [1]/[2/3]/[1/2], you will be able to set FSB frequency manually with CPUBoost utility. Thisprogram also lets you set FSB equal to whatever you like within the interval of 75-165MHz with step 1MHz.

Performance

Not so long ago a lot of people were displeased with the insufficient performance of many mainboards built on VIAchipsets. However, a new chipset from Intel similar to VIA Apollo Pro133A - i820 - also doesn't strike as very fast whenworking with SDRAM. As for VIA, they managed to significantly improve their products. That is why we consider it veryinteresting and exciting to take a look at Chaintech 6ATA4.

We will compare Chaintech 6ATA4 to two mainboards on i820: Supermicro P3SCD (with SDRAM) and AOpen AX6C-L (with RDRAM).Besides, on the charts you will also see the results achieved in the same system built on i440BX chipset (ABIT BE6). The testsystem was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium III 600EB (4.5x133) CPU
• Creative 3DBlaster Annihilator graphics card
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! sound card
• IBM DJNA 372200 HDD
• 128MB PC133 SDRAM by Micron

The system on i820 with RDRAM used 128MB PC800 RDRAM by SEC. The system on i440BX worked in non-nominal mode with thesystem bus overclocked to 133MHz.

Well, compared to its main competitor i820 based system + SDRAM, Chaintech 6ATA4 on VIA Apollo Pro133A looks quite nice.Although it fell behind Supermicro P3SCD in office applications, in games it is simply beyond praise.

As for i440BX, the mainboard on this chipset proved just brilliant. However, you should always bear in mind that itdoes not support 133MHz system bus and all the results were obtained on overclocked ABIT BE6. Far not all the hardwarecan work in a non-nominal mode like that.

Conclusions

Mainboards on VIA Apollo Pro133A, including Chaintech 6ATA4, prove not worse than their competitors, on i820+SDRAM.Besides all the modern features, Chaintech 6ATA4 also performs on the acceptable level and guarantees high stability ofthe system.

Highs

• Supports Coppermine, 133MHz bus, AGP 4x
• TWINBIOS technology
• Overclockability: large range of supported FSB frequencies, allows changing Vcore
• Interesting software bundle (AIRBAG2000)

Lows

• No manual setting of AGP and PCI dividers
• Doesn't allow using a thermal diode integrated into the processor core