The Asetek Vapochill and Abit CX6
An Adventure In Over-Clocking

June 27, 2000 - By Dave Altavilla 

Since the intent of this article was extreme over-clocking, we used a Motherboard from a manufacturer that makes the most "overclockable" boards in the world, Abit.  Here is a brief run down on the CX6, an Intel i820 board that runs with RAMBUS memory. 

Specifications of the Abit CX6 One last time with the i820 and RAMBUS

 
click for full view

Abit does a nice job with the specification sheets for their motherboards.  There is no need to go into great detail here with respect to the feature list.  You can read it for yourself in the above spec.  This board is the last i820/RAMBUS board we will be looking at here at Hot Hardware and as far as i820s go, it is a champ.  All the standard features you would normally find on the latest motherboards, are in there and then some.

We specifically really liked the fact that Abit gives you 4 Fan Power Headers on the board and the ever present Thermal Sensor header for the Thermistor Probe that Abit is providing as standard equipment for all of their boards.  Couple these additions with Abit's traditional great SoftMenu II BIOS and you are in for some real Over-Clocking fun.  The board gives you the ability to set CPU Core Voltage in the BIOS as well as Cache Latency and a host of other tweaks for memory timing etc.  Of all the i820/RAMBUS combinations we have seen to date, the Abit CX6 is the most full featured board on the market.

Installation and Setup Born to run

The CX6 installed in the Vapochill case in minutes.  Abit includes the latest Intel i820 Inf files and ATA66 drivers on the install CD along with Windbond's "Hardware Doctor" software for PC Health Monitoring.  Mechanically, the board is on the large side but not too far out of the norm.

I have but one small gripe with the CX6.  Get rid of that waste of space AMR Slot and give me one more PCI Slot.  This would bring the CX6 as close to perfection as any i820 board could be.  In the picture on the right, you can see the bottom of the Vapochill Compressor and Condenser as well as the CPU Boot and Insulated Tubing.  Once everything was installed, we were pleased with the neat, clean and well organized setup with this winning combination.

The Abit included Hardware Doctor Monitoring Software, for some reason, was not working correctly with the Vapochill.  We were getting weird numbers reported for CPU temp.  On the other hand, the CX6 knew exactly how cold the CPU core was running.  Have a look for yourself.

Folks, all we can say is that we were floored when we saw this.  I honestly never expected to be able to chill the CPU down to -37C.  One thing to bear in mind here is that this is at an idle condition with the system booted well above 1GHz.  We were disappointed that we could not take readings under full load with the Hardware Doctor Utility.  However, if I were to make an educated guess, I would say the CPU was probably still well below 0 Celsius. 

Now, you are probably wondering just how far above that 1GHz. mark we could get.  So were we!