Monday, November 15, 1999

Introduction

Its always a pleasure to introduce a product from a new manufacturer. I say "new", not because the manufacturer itself is new to the market, but rather that this is our first analysis of one of their products. The P6Pro-A+ motherboard makes use of the VIA Apollo Pro133 chipset, which supports PC133 memory, and ATA66 drives. As this is not the first board of this type that we've analyzed, we can now see what distinguishes it from the others.

The Features

As with most modern boards, we find 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, and 1 AGP port onboard. Finally, there are 3 168-pin DIMM slots to accommodate upto 768MB of system memory.

Configuration of the Tekram P6Pro-A+ is set from the BIOS "Chipset Features Setup" submenu, from which the bus frequency can be modified, and, with the help from some jumpers, the clock multiplier can be determined. A pair of jumpers (JP23 and JP21) permit one to select the system bus frequency. The choices available are: automatic adjustment by the system, 100Mhz, and 133Mhz. In the BIOS, an adjustment also permits one to set the memory frequency to that of the main bus, plus or minus 33Mhz.

The processor's core voltage is not adjustable with this board.

Available clock frequencies include: 66/75/83/90/95/100/103/105/110/112/115/120/124 and 133Mhz and multipliers are available from between 2.5X and 8X in steps of 0.5X.

Suite: Additional Features