
Baby-AT board, VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset, 1 MB L2 cache, 3x ISA, 3x PCI, AGP slot, 2x DIMM, 4x SIMM . Voltages: 3.2V to 2.0V
The only motherboard with 2 SIMM banks is the VA-503+ from First International Computer. Due to this it has only 3 instead of the normal 4 PCI slots, but the advantage that you may use 2 or 4 SIMM modules. Memory is a strength of this board: The cacheable area of 256 MB and 1 MB L2 cache make it possible to use almost all applications you may want.
Moreover its performance is excellent: 17,4 fps in Quake II is clearly faster than any other socket 7 of this review, and the Windows performance is also at a top level.
The only thing FIC could allow the next revision is an ATX power connector. The VA-503+ also offers 112 and 124 MHz external clock speeds; I'm working on an article to solve the question if this makes sense and in which kind of memory configuration. At least the board is equipped with 5 ns cache chips, which could make such an overclocking possible. We'll see next month.
FIC obviously was working some time on this product; it's a proof for the Super-7 architecture being matured and ready for challenging the Pentium II.
- Introduction
- AOpen AX59Pro
- A-Trend ATC-5220
- Asus P5A
- Chaintech 5RTA2
- Chaintech 5AGM2
- DFI P5BV3+
- Elitegroup P5SD-B+
- EPoX EP-51 MVP3E
- FIC PA-2013
- FIC VA-503+
- Gigabyte GA-5AX
- IWill XA-100
- Soyo SY-5EH
- TMC AI5VG+
- TMC TI5VG+
- MSI MS5169
- Shuttle HOT-591P
- Tekram P5MVP-A4
- Soltek SL54U1
- Superpower SP-A586B
- Tyan S1590S "Trinity"
- Benchmarks
- Recommendations