Benchmarks:

All tests were conducted on the VP6 with 128MB CAS2 SDRAM, ABIT Siluro GF2 MX VGA card, and a 20GB Maxtor DiamondMax ATA/100 IDE hard drive.

A quick Sandra test was up first:

These results were pretty much exactly what I expected to see. The CPU scores are excellent, while the memory scores are less than thrilling. They confirm what everybody has been saying: you absolutely must tweak the memory settings with VIA chipset motherboards. Later, by setting the DRAM timings in the BIOS to "Turbo," the DRAM bank interleaving to "4-Way," and the SDRAM cycle length to 2 -and with the CPUs still at 800/133- I was able to push these numbers up into the far more satisfying area of 398 and 402MB/s for CPU and FPU bandwidth.

I am including the results of the Sandra hard drive test here as well. Keep in mind that I did NOT use the HighPoint controller for these tests, nor did I test the RAID capabilities of this board. (That subject will be treated in a full-length article here next week.) However, I wanted to see if VIA's 686B south bridge was providing 100kb/s transfer rates. Clearly it was not:

Yuk. An update to version 4.29 of the 4 in 1 drivers did not improve this situation; in fact it pushed the score down to 9128. Later, when all the tests were done, I plugged the hard drive into one of the HighPoint ports and all my fears were realized: the system immediately began to behave strangely, randomly mislettering drives, and occasionally ignoring my CD-RW completely.