21 Mobo Salute: Pentium III i815 mobos

FIC FS35

Board Revision: 1.0

BIOS Version: IDB42 (December 8, 2000)

FIC sent us a MicroATX motherboard called FS35. It is equipped with the 815E chipset, featuring the Intel graphics controller, AGP 4x, two DIMM sockets, three PCI slots, CNR, UltraATA/100 controller, AC97 sound system, on-board PC speaker and 4 USB ports (only 2 are usable).

Judging from the benchmarks, this board is unable to keep pace with the other four newcomers. Still, the FIC board provides good performance and is on par with the rest of the 815 boards, which perform similarly.

Unfortunately, the box did not include the final manual, so I cannot tell you anything about its quality. Instead, I found the add-on disc, which contains Norton Ghost (Ghost is able to clone or to backup partitions or whole hard drives), AntiVirus 2000 and Virtual Drive, as well as a set of flat cables and the driver disc.

The FIC FS35 was absolutely reliable and easy to handle. The BIOS also provides you with some overclocking features.

Homepage: http://www.fica.com