I would like to share my experiences of the Abit VT6X4 slot 1 motherboard and its VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset.
In the past I have always used boards with an Intel chipset in my own machines. As my PC is important for work and study as well as for play, stability has always been an influencing factor. With the VT6X4, Abit have implemented stability in the VIA chipset.
The CPU I am using is a Slot 1 Intel Pentium 3 733MHz (133MHz FSB) chip, which I picked up second hand very inexpensively as an upgrade to my Celeron 366 (overclocked to 550). The P3 is a fast and stable chip - it runs pretty cool for a 733MHz CPU.
The VIA chipset is not the fastest solution available; those who lust for those extra frames per second in Quake 3 should consider an overclocked Intel BX chipset solution - the BX chipset doesn't support a 1/2 AGP divider and is therefore running the AGP bus at 89MHz with a 133MHz bus CPU. This is the beauty of the VIA chipset - it supports a proper 1/2 AGP divider and AGP 4x.
The only other alternative to VIA is Intel's "Solano" 815 chipest. However, boards based on this are more expensive and tend to be socket 370 only - no good for my Slot 1 CPU.
815 does have support for ATA/100 IDE transfers, whereas the VIA does not. This is one of the few areas where the VIA chipset is let down - hard disk transfers benchmark considerably slower.
The memory transfer rates attainable with the VIA chipset are not quite as fast as BX or 815 either. However, with quality memory that can run at CAS2 and the right BIOS tweaks, they are at least in roughly the same ball park as BX.
All this said, this setup doesn't hang about with my current CPU! There is lots of overclocking potential as well - with 140MHz and 150MHz bus settings I can run this CPU at 770 or 825MHz respectively. And of course the memory performance improves at these speeds too.
Overall, the VIA is an inexpensive solution. The VT6X4 even has built-in sound, although I use an AWE64 Gold in one of it's ISA slots (no ISA slots on the Intel 815 either!).
I would thoroughly recommend this board for those looking for a stable and relatively inexpensive 133MHz bus motherboard solution.
More details
Manufacturer Support
Excellent
Instruction manual
Very useful
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
