Review of Socket 7 PCI Motherboards
FIC PA-2010+
Here we have a VIA Apollo VPX chipset board in ATX format. The K6 at 250 MHz was not logged in correctly, none the less it worked fine. I got real difficulties with the Pentium MMX 233. Sometimes it was logged in as Pentium 133 MMX, but performance was good enough that I assume this were 233 MHz. If somebody wants to operate at 83 MHz, he should be aware he gets the version with ICW W48C67-1 or ICS9147-01 clock generator, all other support 75 MHz at the highest. At 83 MHz bus speed, SDRAM bank interleave had to be disabled, otherwise you would get heavy errors. As all VIA chipset based boards, the PA-2010+ also supports the linear burst for Cyrix/IBM CPUs. You can get performance gains of around 2-3% when using this alternative burst mode, so don't forget to check this. If you are looking for an ATX board and VIA chipset, please consider the new PA-2012 (1 MB) or the PA-2011 (with 512 kB), they are much faster.
ATX format; ATX & AT power supply; VIA Apollo VPX chipset; 4x ISA, 4x PCI; 4x SIMM, 2x DIMM; Award flash BIOS; 512 kB PB-Cache (6 ns); external frequencies: 55, 60, 66, 75, 83 MHz (83 MHz only with clock generator as described above); BF2 jumper equipped, I/O chip: Winbond; busmaster DMA 2 or PIO 4 onboard; FDC onboard; 2x serial 16550; 1x EPP/ECP parallel; 1x PS/2 mouse; 2x USB; IrDA support; core voltages: 3.2V, 2.9V, 2.8V; SDMS support ver. 3.07.
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