Review of Socket 7 PCI Motherboards

FIC PA-2011

This is the ATX version of the PA-2007, but just with 512 kB Cache. Technical facts are all the same. Just the most important (performance) is not at the same high level as the PA-2007. The board has an additional connector for AT power supply. Our revision 2.2 does not have PCI special cycle support. By the way, the PA-2010+ does, I don't know why. The user gets into real trouble if he tries setting the SDRAM timing to 2/2 clocks. The result is that the board didn't want to talk with me until I made multiple use of the reset swich. I still haven't found out the reasons for this; it happened with every CPU and with EDOs instead of SDRAM, too. I'm confident a newer BIOS could improve this. I will also update this page as soon as I have some extra time to deal with this. Enable linear CPU burst when using Cyrix or IBM CPUs, you will be rewarded by a few per cents more performance. Be aware of using the Pentium MMX: This board is quite slow with it.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.