Only the Best: 9 Athlon Motherboards With The AMD 760 Chipset

FIC AD11

Board Revision: 1.2

BIOS Version: 03/16/2001

Read the initial review.

Company Info

FIC (First International Computer) is also a large motherboard manufacturer and usually work close together with VIA, as they provide the reference boards. Their main pillar is the OEM business and only a part of the motherboards produced is sold under the FIC brand.

Hardware Features

The AD11 comes with only 5 PCI slots, but it has one CNR slot. Here you can see that AMR and CNR are totally uninteresting for end users, but is a cheap upgrade option for major customers that buy in large quantities.

This board has a standard AGP slot (AGP 4x), two DIMM sockets, AC97 sound system (again preferred among OEMs, as its implementation is cheap) and only two fan headers. One of them is even used by the North Bridge fan, leaving only one for your CPU cooler. Unfortunately any additional fans must be attached directly to a power supply cable, which leaves out the ability to monitor the speed of the fan.

FIC did not use switching regulators, resulting in quite high heat dissipation.

BIOS

Standard Award/Phoenix BIOS.

Configuration And Manual

CPU configuration has to be done completely via two DIP switches (voltage and multiplier ratio). One jumper (FS) determines the FSB speed, while you can alter the actual speed starting from the 100 or 133 MHz.

Test & Performance

The performance of FIC's AD11 is within the midfield of the test bed. Though I could run the Micron memory at the optimum parameters, some motherboards are faster. However, I prefer that the board runs stable with hardcore timings rather than better performance at the cost of system stability.

As the voltage regulators produce a lot of heat, you should make sure that the airflow inside your case is strong enough to keep everything cool: CPU, RAM, North Bridge, voltage regulators, hard drives - everything heats up your system.

Shipment

FIC ships this motherboard with a full set of cables (one 80pin IDE, one 40pin IDE, one floppy), a comprehensive manual, a driver CD and another CD with Norton Ghost and Anti Virus.