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.

FIC PA-2011, Rev. 2.2

ATX format; ATX & AT power supply; VIA Apollo VP2 chipset; 4x ISA, 4x PCI; 4x SIMM, 2x DIMM; AMI flash BIOS; 512 kB PB-Cache (6 ns); external frequencies: 50, 55, 60, 66, 75 MHz; BF2 jumper equipped, I/O chip: SMC; busmaster Ultra 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.