VIA KT333 Put To The Test: 18 Motherboards Compared

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FIC AN17: Past Its Prime?

Included in the FIC package are two IDE cables, one floppy cable, a user manual, a driver CD and a USB port bracket. The boot process takes quite a while until the system is up and running - 17 seconds total. The reason for this is the integrated RAID controller, which searches the IDE channels for disk drives and cannot be deactivated. A few details are worthy of criticism: the mini-sized passive cooler results in the temperature increasing up to 70 degrees Celsius. The temperature of the CPU die is still measured, quite inaccurately, by the thermistor beneath the processor. When it comes to overclocking, FIC is quite restrictive: the clock multiplier is automatically set by BIOS, and the maximum CPU core voltage is 1.85 Volt. In the performance evaluations, the FIC board often lands just short of last place, thus achieving lower performance levels than our reference board with the KT266A chipset. Compared to the motherboards of previous years, the AN17 shows that the manufacturer has fallen behind somewhat.