FIC VB-601-V With VIA Apollo Pro

Here we have the second board with the Apollo Pro chipset. This one is an ATX board with 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, the AGP slot and four DIMM sockets. The other boards use the Award BIOS - this one comes with AMI. A lot of performance influencing settings can be changed, but most of them lead to instabilities or hang ups during the Business Winstone runs.

After trying and playing and configuring one whole day I finally got the benchmark results; FIC added a note which said that this board used a chipset revision which is not going to be shipped. Luckily, because of the trouble you can really easy get into it's not very good to start optimizing...

The low price will make such a motherboard a good competitior for LX and EX motherboards. Power users should only go for a BX board.

Due to the difficulties of the pre-release chipset I don't want to evaluate the board itself now. The memory tests were not too successful: Only the Samsung 10 ns memory and the PC-100 type ran reliable at 100 MHz - all others caused problems. The 256 MB module did not want to run at all once again. It seems as if such XXL memory modules are a problem for many motherboards.