The much maligned S370 format does indeed deliver on standard benchmark results, as the Abit ZM6 performed as well in our tests as most 440BX based mainboards with Slot-1 based Celerons have previously.
We witnessed no lockups or deviations from the standard level of quality that we've come to expect from Intel-based mainboards, ZD's Winstone99 in particular had no undesirable errors of problems.
Overall the ZM6 performs well, as you'd probably expect it ould.
No Abit mainboard review would be complete without attempts to break new records in CPU overclocking.
The ZM6 comes equipped with Abit's selectable voltage regulation within Soft Menu II, allowing users to up the juice in pursuit of higher clock speeds.
We tested three house Celeron 366 and 400 CPUs with the ZM6, and found that the addition of adjustable voltage still wouldn't allow us to overclock them beyond an 83MHz bus speed. 100MHz PPGA Celeron overclocks are rare, we've haven't been able to achieve one yet, and that trend continued during our ZM6's testing.
We did however find the voltage manipulation of the ZM6 to be a boon when seeking greater system stability at the brutal 83MHz front side bus speed (41.5MHz to all PCI components). All three CPUs were able to handle over an hour of continuous Prime95 torture testing and looping Quake2 timedemos without any errors being reported once they were set to operate at 2.2volts.
Although the 100MHz PPGA overclock remains safe from our efforts….for now….we applaud the ZM6's stability at both the 83 and 75MHz FSBs.