KA-6100

I pulled an old computer down out of my parents attic the other day and decided to breathe new life into it. Now that I'm almost done I wanted to share a few things I learned about the FIC KA-6100 motherboard.

- Despite not being listed on any of the compatibility charts the KA-6100 doesnt seem to have any problem accepting the Powerleap PL-iP3/T Slot1->Socket 370 adapter. I purchased a Powerleap PL-iP3/T Celeron 1.4 ghz off ebay. The only odd thing is the bios doesnt show the correct CPU/MHZ at startup. Currently it reads Pentium II MMX at =90 MHZ. However it is performing like a Celeron 1.4 ghz with no stablility issues.

-Installing the maximum amount of supported ram (768MB 3x256) is very bad for system performance. I know alot of motherboards of this era had similar issues - not enough cache to address all the system memory but this was truely awful performance. I was running a benchmark to test it but I didnt have the heart to let it finish. It felt like Windows XP was running on a Pentium 75. As soon as I removed one of the 256 sticks, performance returned to its expected level. I will do more testing to see if I can add an additional 128 megs or if anything over 512 megs is bad.

-I did a little bit of limited overclocking testing, for front bus speed there are two unsupported settings you wont find in the manual - 112 mhz and 133mhz. There is also a 103 mhz setting. I didnt expect any problems with 103mhz and didnt experience any. At 112 mhz the ps2 mouse stops responding. I didnt try 133mhz because I only had PC100 memory.

-The bios will not support IDE harddrive larger than 32 gigs. You will have to use drive overlay software to get full use of larger drives.

-Initially I attempted to install Windows Vista onto this PC. I figured why not it seemed to meet the minimum processor,memory specs,graphics,harddrive space specs. Unfortunately this motherboard is only ACPI 1.2 and Vista requires an ACPI 2.0 motherboard.