Abit-BP6 ReCap - Dual Processor Motherboard Back to Life 

I too had this board, "back in the day". I ran my 466mhz Celerons at 525mhz easily. Was so much fun as an enthusiast board. No more stuttering and you could truly multitask long before the multi core chips we all know and love today.

Oh wow! So many memories! 😻 I had one of these and used it to develop and test the C++ Linux-based data acquisition system of a high energy physics experiment at CERN, around 1999. Having two CPU sockets, in times before multi-core, was an absolute saviour for dealing with soft-realtime; on a single core system any hiccup would become a system freeze. I loved this MB: even if it was really not the most stable thing, it was cheap enough that I could have it at my desk, all for myself. I don't think we would have succeeded without it ❤️

When it comes to caps, they can be very much like the proverbial horse shoes and hand grenades: close enough is close enough. Any modern low-ESR electrolytic type from the likes of Nichicon, UCC, Rubycon, or Panasonic would likely have worked perfectly well in place of the originals. Do bear in mind that lower-quality parts may well have not met their stated specs on their datasheet, even when new.

Yaay! I had one of these boards with two Celeron 500's in it - a whole GHz of processing power and SMP to boot! I ran it with Linux and it worked a treat. I don't remember any issues with it and it ran as a reliable server for quite a few years. It finally got retired when cheaper, faster single-socket solutions became widely available. Great fun and a real talking point back in the day 😄

I had that motherboard back in the day! My friends were jealous of my dual cpu gaming rig. 😂

I had this board, what a beast. In the midst of the capacitor plague. IBM servers and HP machines were also hit by bad caps.

I had a BP6 with dual celeron 533. I ran Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS 5 on it back in the day. BeOS was a lot of fun because it was designed for dual processor systems and was super responsive.

Watching now, but I’m excited. Thanks for covering this. Not only was the BP6 the Mobo in the first computer I built myself, I have one coming in the mail this week. What timing!

This was my favorite board back in the day... had 2x celeron 433's @ 750+ each, peltier cooled, iced over at all times... there was a second entire tower for this build, which housed 2x atx psu's wired in parallel to give 2x the amperage, for the cooling. I later did a VP6 build with, well... first with 2x coppermine celeron 733's @ over 1ghz, prior to the official barrier of 1000mhz officially being broken too mind you. And I had it, with two "cores" no less. Pretty neat. . . I later swapped those celeries for PIII 733's or 750's... can't remember the OG speed of them, but I also had both of those over 1Ghz as well. Also TEC cooled. . . But at this point I had a standalone benchtop PSU to handle all the cooling. Though, you had to be vigilant of startup power order, where before it was all instant and automatic. But this was better on space for sure, and more "professional" I guess. Regardless, these were great days... Also, I just recently enough did a retro VP6 build, of course firstly recapping the VP6. Of all places I found it pop up on FB market, from a NY seller... shipped to me as an xmas gift, and it was for sure a great one. I have a video of it running on my channel, can't miss it.

OMG, I remember, back in the day, the combo Abit & Celeron being the absolute *beast* when it came to OC capabilities. I remember having my Celeron 300A being pushed to 450 MHz when I threw it on a BH6 mobo. This thing could outperform a Pentium III for way less expensive ! You won, mate : I subbed to your channel. Good old memories here 🥰

You couldn't find any caps in digikey because you were searching for exactly "6.3v rated voltage". In reality any cap with the same capacitance and same specs regarding the ESR, while supporting a higher maximum voltage would have worked just fine. Capacitor manufacturing definitely has improved, we now have capacitors of the same physical size that can withstand more voltage. Nice that you were able to make it work anyway :D

IVE BEEN WAITING TO SEE THIS BOARD AGAIN!! I'm the one who sent it in the original mailbag, I actually had two! I found them in the recycling room at Free Geek... I still have mine in my garage with an updated bios :P This board is the coolest thing in PC hardware history and ever since the MaximumPC retrospective I read on this board 10 years ago I wanted to see someone else talk about this board. Loved the video, I was really interested to learn more about ABIT's contribution to the capacitor plague :))

Really cool to bring this beast back from the boneyard. I had a buddy back in the day that had a similar dual Socket 370 board (might have been the BP6) with dual 1Ghz Pentium 3's in it. And yeah, he put Win2k on the rig. Abit and EPOX are two board brands I still get a little misty-eyed about. So sad they're gone.

At least in my part of the world, most of us used these as servers, and ran Linux on them. Linux was SMP capable from long, long before this board was released. It was much cheaper than Dual Pentium IIs and faster than Dual Pentium Pros.

Oh, that brings back memories. I had a dual PII 333MHz which I used mostly with BeOS, but dual booted it with Windows for games. I dubbed it the "Devil's Rig" and I loved it. I do think I still have the MoBo somewhere 'round here, but one of the processors is long gone.

Oh man, i loved my BP-6. Dual Celly 400s, overclocked the snot out, water cooling! What did i ever do with that thing...

I remember wanting this board sooo bad, back in the days. I wouldn't have been able to fully utilise it. But the cool factor was off the charts for me back then 🙂

I had one of these boards I had several dual processor boards at the time. I think this was the one I had 300A chips on it running at 600Mhz. I bought a window AC unit and ducked it to the system pushing air directly on the heat sinks of the processors. I do remember it crashing and then the system would longer run over clocked.

I had one with two Celeron 400's in it that overclocked to 600MHz. It was still working in 2003, despite the cheesy caps. That board left my possession that year, but I imagine it eventually died.

I'm so stocked about future videos about this build. Thanks!

I had one of these. LOVED it!

Your cat cameo during the printing at the end was a pleasant surprise!

I had one of those boards! It was rock stable with two of the famous Celeron 300a CPUs overclocked to 450Mhz. Ran that thing for several years, SMP was a real luxury back in the day!

I had the board! Dual Celeron 366Mhz OCed to 550Mhz with Alpha coolers. That thing was over the top. I ended up selling it because of the OS issues you mentioned. I had too much trouble trying to get drivers for “consumer” hardware like sound cards and GPUs working on NT and 2000. Win2k was better but still painful.

I've got a BP6 with 366's OC to 550. It also sports a Voodoo5 5500. Ran Linux and windows 2000 workstation primarily. It didn't get replaced until I moved to AMD Athlon. I wished I'd kept the Athlon machine too.

On the input and output of the VRM, you often have capacitors in parallel, which means capacitance adds up. Abit and lots of other manufacturers often used more capacitance than actually needed, because by using the biggest size and capacity possible (they're restricted by cooler size), they could get much lower ESR (esr will vary with diameter and height of capacitor). So because of this, when you move from electrolytic capacitors to polymer capacitors, it's usually possible to use slightly smaller capacitance values (for example 1200uF instead of 1500uF would be perfectly fine on this motherboard) Also, they tended to use 6.3v or 10v rated electrolytic capacitors on the output of the VRM because again, they needed very low ESR capacitors. Considering the output voltage of the VRM of less than 3v, you probably could use 4v rated polymer capacitors, but 6.3v polymer capacitors are also quite common. Also, you should also be aware of other stores with good reputation like Mouser, Farnell / Newark (same company, different names in different regions, now owned by Arrow if my memory is correct) , RS Components, and TME (in Europe) By the way ... as the board seems to use only 5v to power the CPUs, when replacing those 10v rated capacitors, you could replace with 6.3v rated polymer capacitors.

what a blast from the past ! :D was rocking a BP6 as a linux terminal server back in 2000

I still have my dual processor board up in the attic, complete with both processors, it served me well before dying, always thought it was a PSU failure that trashed the board, the plan was to mount the board in a glass fronted wall frame, such an awesome machine before multi core arrived. immense nostalgia trip - thanks

I remember wanting one of these so badly when I was in high school. It is awesome to see one running again ❤

I didn't realize the BP6 board was based on the 440BX chip set. In 2005 I came across a dual socket 370 board (GA-6VTXD) new in box for real cheap and used it to run SETI@home for several years. It is an inserting board as it supposed to support up to only 2GB ram but I think you can put up to 3GB or 3.25GB if I'm remembering correctly and supports dual Pentium Ⅲ Tualatin Processors up to 1.4 GHz. I'll have to dig that machine out again and check it out.😃

I used to run mismatched PPros, P2s and Celerons in SMP back in the day. I also killed a Celeron 300A doing the drill and solder SMP enabling mod prior to slockets and boards like the BP6 hitting the scene... When running mismatched CPUs, the CPU speed of the first socket/slot is what gets reported. The second socket runs at it's normal multiplier, and matching FSB. So if you've got a 366 and a 300, both using a 66mhz FSB, first CPU runs at 366, second at 300, BIOS reports the CPU speed as 366. Some systems will throw a minor fit if the CPUs don't match during post, like the old IBM rackmount Slot 1 systems I abused, but you could just keypress past the error and they'd run just fine after.

I really like how you greatly improved the stability of that board by upgrading it to modern solid caps. I have been building PCs since the early '90's and really admire your work.

I still have mine. I haven't fired it up in several years but I never had any stability problems, probably since I never overclocked it for any significant time. I have dual 300MHz Celerons in it and ran Windows NT. There was an active BP6 community and was the first time I ever saw water cooling for a PC. I remember a guy bought a transmission cooler from an auto parts store, some copper pipe fittings an aquarium pump and used a Tupperware container for the reservoir.

Wow! The Abit BP6 brings back a lot of memories! I remember wanting this setup so badly!

man I remember abit. Thanks for bringing back fond memories.

Nice to see tabby again, keeping an eye on the dot matrix. We look fwd to a follow up on this board. Great project.

Oh wow. Blast from the past! I had one of these and it was great. No cap problems.

I currently have right next to me a dual Pentium III 933 system on a ECS D6VAA board that I've had since new when I was a kid. I've since recapped it, added the 933's (used to be dual 450), 768mb of ram (can do 1.5gb but not stable overclocked) and running it at 150FSB at 1050mhz. Also added an Asus Magic 8170 Geforce 4 (originally an ATI rage 128, games said nope) and it's basically got Half-Life and CS 1.5 at the 100fps engine cap all the time. Reliving your childhood past on ACTUAL hardware of the time is the best way to go about it. I'll never let it go.

I had one of these back in the day, with dual P3s and Raid Maxtor drives running dual monitors. It was pretty nice.

Great video. This brings back some memories.... I had a dual P2/P3 slot setup back in the day. It used a iwill DBD100 board.

Cool to see this one coming up, I still have mine, still runs with original caps even :)

Love this board first build I did on my own. One of the only boards I wish I still had.

The BP6 was the first board i ever put money on. I was a blast running a game in “real time” on one and the OS on the other. (Winblows) Loved it!

I had this board and it was great, overclocking worked really well for me.

My favorite motherboard ever. I was just thinking about it this morning for some reason.

Thanks for the video! Im a long time Abit lover and still miss Abit boards - and many other like DFI, Chaintech, EPoX (now SUPoX just for Asian market), Soltek and many more. There are boards i dont miss like PCChips and Albatron. But yes, Abit is and stays my favorite board OEM of all time. I hope to see more of Abit, and look forward to enjoy the videos!

Hey man, great memories watching this video. I had a BP6 running twin 366s at 550 each (though unstable and eventually had to run at stock speed.) I always preferred Win2000 over 98 (and even XP). This workstation served me well for years. Good times

Brings back.. uh... memories lol thanks for the videos!

Love your content, Reminds my of why I got into IT. I grew up on this stuff, commodore 64- 386 systems - apple iie's - This is a time machine back to the good ol days for me.. Much love and appreciation.

I'd like to point out that those coolers are perfectly adequate for those cpus. Socket 370 coolers were often rebadged socket 7 coolers anyway. If you start doing cpu heavy tasks, yeah, get something better, but they'll really be fine for hours with those heatsinks. Seriously, check out all but the highest end coolers. All of them are smaller than either of the heatsinks you were using. Heck, that first one probably was originally a 370 cooler unless you picked it up brand new labeled as a socket 7 cooler. It was generally socket A that had the beefier coolers, and those are interchangeable with socket 7/370, though be careful with the putting a socket A cooler on Socket 7. It has a tendency to break the plastic clips on the socket. Ask me how I know.

Oh, wow! This board brings back memories since I ran one back in the day for like a year or two as my main desktop. I think it then became a Linux server for a while. I don't really remember having any issues with it but that's over 20 years ago.

I owned one of these back in the day! Had Windows 2000 on it, dual Celeron 533Mhz. Was my dream machine.

I've been working up the courage to do something similar to my dual Pentium Pro, thanks for the inspiration!

Luckily I subscribe to you, as I have this exact same board that was shelved because of the exact same problems that you described. Thanks to being early in the age of this video, I have already ordered the same caps before they are all bought up, saving me the hassle of finding alternatives. Thanks, Shelby!

Nice work!

Omg omg. I had one with two Celeron 366As! Was my first experience with Windows 2000. Thank you for making this video.

Legend is right! It's rare that I remember the model number of a motherboard but Abit BP6 has that honour (along with Asus K7V). I had one of these running Windows 2000, it was packed with as much RAM as I could afford, two Celeron 366A's running at 550MHz and a janky pile of disks. It was our lanparty server, it hosted 'backups' of all games that people might need and all the other files that people liked to trade at these events as well as running any game servers we needed. It was the first motherboard that us common gamers could use to put together a system like this, it was also pretty good just for general enthusiast/gaming purposes as well with id making sure to support SMP in their game engines at least, while there wasn't a whole lot of other software that could take advantage of the dual chips it was still pretty great for bragging points.

this dudes room reminds me of the late 90s. love it!

Oh man, this brings back memories for me.

I still have mine somewhere rattling around in a box in my shop. Last time I used it was around 2003 or so. It def had cap issues by the end. Mine ran dual 366 overclocked to 550 from day 1, with big old honkin globalwin heatsink/fans on it. Man I got some stories with that rig. Good times.

BROTHER, YOU ARE THE BEST!!! You oooh really helped me!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Had one of these with dual Celeron 433's running nt4. Loved it. Never missed a beat

This was the motherboard to buy back there. Like many ppl in the comments section, I also overclocked those dual celerons. Bought them at overclockers in the UK. Fantastic piece of kit.

bro thanks i am new to this channel and i have like 3 of those boards thanks for helping

Nice! IIRC, Asus and/or ASRock boards were the ones with the polarity silkscreen backwards. I remember noticing it many years ago after a recap, but fortunately before powering it on :P.

Man this brings back Memories, till this day i still like windows 2000. Simple stable and clean !!

I have this on my NERD wall.. love it back in the days :)

I had one of these boards and totally had a cap POP while doing a paper for school.

Super cool! What a strange and wonderful motherboard!

the brought back some memories, was rocking a BP and dual celeron 300a's back in the day, 50% OC to 450mhz. Was a beast at the time

Man I remember reading about dual socket motherboards in high school and wishing I could get a setup like that. My neighbor had a dual CPU setup on his PC and I thought it was the coolest thing.

wow memories, I bought one of these while I was taking my MSCE courses. I built it with a dual OS of NT 4.0 and 98 SE. It ran awesome and we played some serious HalfLife LAN parties.

23 years old... I had one of these boards in high school running celeron 400s.

I had this... it was fantastic!

Nice video, I had this same board with dual 433 celerons back in the day. I can't for the life of me remember who I sold it to but I know I sold it, wish I still had it.

Some may refer to Steve from Gamers Nexus as "Tech Jesus", however they are mistaken. Tech Tangents is the one true Tech Jesus, saving old electronics from landfill, oh man.

I had one of these fun boards back in the day. Still have the processors Cel500s. I upgraded to a MSI 649D with p3 1ghz, still have and it does run also. Then i have a SGI rack mount thats running a Tyan with p3 733 procs. Anyways thanx for sharing the video, great to remember the classics

Congrats on recovering an incredibly unique board! I'm working on two of my own at the moment. One of them has some pretty nasty trace damage from everyone's favorite battery maker, Varta, and the other just won't recognize video cards in ISA, PCI or AGP slots. Reading online indicates that the BIOS is corrupt, but everything I tried to clear any possible corrupt settings has failed. So now I'm trying to get my hands on a chip writer and the proper eprom or eeprom chip to write a replacement. But I did fix an old AT case, so I'm 1 for 3! That's good for me!

I loved my bp6. had NT installed on it but had to dual boot 98 because of directx limitations. This board really came to life when 2k got parity with 98 in gaming.

My first dual-processor system was using two Pentium 150MHz on a Tyan board. It was fun, but also much quirks. Things are so much better these days.

Some tips for you: you can actually use any low esr capacitors in there! For something this old you shouldn't matter, back in the days we would even use regular electrolytic and it would last. You can find some original size replacements on china like Aliexpress. As for the capacitor removal, you should use a hot air gun and heat up the whole area that you are working on ( usually at 250C for lead based or 350C for lead free solder) for like a minute, and then work the capacitors out putting some new solder and BGA flux and it will clean the thru holes in one shot.

I've got the same to look forward to on my VP6. Unlike the other couple I've seen for sale mine still has all original Jackocn caps - though luckily, I have a lot of spare standard and low ESR (bought explicitly for VP6's VRM - local electronics store ftw) caps due to other boards having needed repairs. Overclocking dual Puentium III is fun.

Your workbench gives me PTSD of my computer repair days and working with people that had no semblance of organization

I had one circa 1999, with 2 Celeron 433 running at 490 MHz, 256 Mo ram, a Voodoo 3 and UW Scsi disk. What a beast ! :)

i had one of these! dual celery 366's overclocked to 550 back in the day! windows 2000 workstation for that smp sweetness abit were a great enthusiast brand - wish they were still around

Very cool man! I had a dual amd xp system way way back in the day. Also had a dual slot 1 system BXDU Gigabyte board. Wish I never sold that stuff now but who knew!

My first SMP capable mobo was an Abit board with dual Celeron and modified socket 370-slot 1 adapters (Slotkets) installed. Then I upgraded to the BP6 board, which got lost when I moved many moons ago. Scrapped all of my 32-bit computers...

I had one of these bought from a computer show in Cali with my dual celery’s setup, I felt like a million buxs that day.ll now look at where we are

I was mad enough to have a VP6 back when they were new, dual p3-700s were fun to have

I had one of those. Awesome!

Cool! Back to then in the University we bought one (we want a relative cheap hardware we can run Linux with SMP, meant as the main server in the student's lab), backed up by donations from the users. So we went to the shop with kilograms of coins, they were really not happy there :) it took hours to count the money and all the time they come out with slightly different total value. At the end they said: "ok, enough is enough, let's say it's just the right amount of money" ;)

DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I still have mine too! thanks for this video i'll re-cap mine!

At one point I had about 20 of these from a school, I still have 4 now and they still work

Holy grail motherboard for OC'ing Dual Celly 500's. Always wanted one.

Fantastic video Shelby. I would love to see a follow up build vid? Oh and running win2k of course. I would have loved to have a setup like this back in the day for Cubase VST 2.4 ...

i absolutely loved this board. dual celeron 566 @850mhz! i didn't know about the caps issue and scrapped it a long time ago.

Damn, I remember wanting one of these when I was a teen, well almost an adult. This was around the time I won the contract to build my high school computer network (1st one). I was 18 :P and got over 100 computers on that network using 100Mbps hubs at the time (in spite of my recommendation to use switches the school opted for hubs and multiple links to the server, 1 per hub, top save on costs. Them managed/smart switches were much more expensive back then). Still had to open 56 computers at the time as a lot of them, unlike some years later, did not have embedded network adapter so I had to manually install those network cards. And most were in fact ISA, so because plug and play at that time was more like Plug and Pray I actually manually configured every single one to ensure there were no conflicting settings such as IRQs, DMAs or Base addresses. This was crucial in particular on any computer that had a sound card as those would typically have at least a base address conflict and typically at least the base address and IRQ. DMA's only a bunch of them I had to be worried with.

I only remember seeing dual CPU boards in magazines, Dual Slot-1 mostly. That was the fantasy setup right there.

I ran a server at one of my first jobs on a BP6. It had two Celeron 300A at 450 MHz (they ALL did it stable, due to the disabled cache I guess, I also had a 300A@450MHz at home in a BE6 IIRC), ran 24/7 for at least 3 years, hosting pages on the Internet like a boss (it ran RHL 6.2 or so, no issue with SMP support obviously). It was like 10th of a price of a proper dual Xeon system, ideal for a small local provider. And of course one day it started misbehaving, now we know all it needed was a recap, but hey, it did its job long enough there was already better hardware to migrate to. I say BP6 was a win and a legend!

Got one of those bad boys in the loft. It was super.