Installation

There is not a whole lot of space around the socket, nor are there any heatsink mounting holes. Take a look at the photo below.

You can't see it too well, but the Silent Boost that we just installed onto the motherboard pushes against one of the capacitors, and the actual installation was also moderately difficult due to the row of capacitors on the other side of the socket. The memory slots and the AGP card are far enough from each other that installation of one will not interfere with the installation of the other as on some other motherboards. On the other hand, because of the target market here, the stock AMD coolers will have little problems fitting, and we don't see most people who buy this board as being the type to purchase coolers larger than the Silent Boost (a great performer, by the way)

The ATX connector is far from the CPU socket, so it avoids any airflow interference. However, the 12v square pin is not put in such a good place. The route the cable has to take from the power supply has to go around the CPU heatsink and/or go over the heatsink fan, which is awkward from our viewpoint.

We had no problems in our mid-tower case but it's worth noting that the floppy connector is located at the bottom edge of the motherboard and may provide problems to those people who have larger cases as the length of the floppy cable may not reach all the way.

BIOS Settings

The BIOS is the typical Award BIOS, and is accessed by pressing delete on POST. Unfortunately, FIC stripped the BIOS of most tweaks, and we are left with only a few select editable settings.

Here's a quick summary of what you can and cannot edit in this BIOS:

  • Voltage - no settings available (CPU and memory)
  • Ram timings - CAS 2, 2.5 or 3, nothing else available
  • Front Side Bus - 100-210, in 5-15 mhz increments
  • AGP/PCI lock/divider - not available

The BIOS was not very smart - it did not recognise our Athlon 2700+ properly. We had to go into the BIOS and manually set the FSB at 166 instead. Not a big problem, but somewhat disappointing nonetheless and perhaps confusing for the newcommers who might have purchased this board.