Thursday, October 19, 2000

Introduction

Last time, we were taken by surprise when received a new motherboard based on the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset. This time, we're really surprised to have received a new Intel 440BX board to review! As you can guess, the FIC FB11 is just that board, and it does serve to prove that the 440BX hasn't lost a bit of its moxie. It doesn't support ATA66 though - however, by adding the optional NR100 IDE-contoller, not only ATA66 will be supported but ATA100 will also be supported. Will its aging ATA33 interface be the FB11's fatal weakness? Well, with that question in mind, let's get on with the analysis, and see what's what...

The features

The Fic FB11 is expandable via 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, and an AGP port. There are also 4 168-pin DIMM slots available, which can support up to 1GB of PC100, or PC133 memory. This also happens to be the first time in a while that we've seen two ISA slots on the same board; no doubt because we haven't seen a BX board in an equally long while.

Configuration of the FB11 is accomplished either through the BIOS, or through the on-board jumpers. Among the jumpers of interest we find the clock of Dip switches labeled SW1, which can be used to set the CPU's clock multiplier. As you can guess, this feature can be ignored, as it no longer serves any useful purpose in most cases. There are also jumpers FS1, and FS2, which can be used to force the Front-Side Bus to operate at 66Mh, 100MHz, or 133MHz. To really get control of the processor, however, one must travel on to the "Chipset Features Setup" menu located in the BIOS. From there, it is possible to select from a range of FSB settings ranging from 66Mhz that 166Mhz and includes: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 112Mhz, 117Mhz, 124Mhz, 133Mhz, 138Mhz, 140Mhz, 150Mhz, 160Mhz, and 166Mhz.

A jumper numbered JP3, and named "Over Voltage Driving" is also supplied, and apparently can be used to augment the CPU's voltage. Unfortunately, no information about this feature is supplied in the user's manual.

Technical details

A limited amount of space is provided around the processor. This makes it difficult to install large heatsinks.

The memory slots are located far enough from the AGP port that there is no risk of the memory retention clpis coming into contact with an installed graphics-card.

Ten 1500Mfd capacitors have been placed around the processor, which we found lacking. 2200Mfd capacitors would have been better.

The CPU locking lever is made of metal; no risk of breaking it.

Only 2 fan connectors are located on the board.

A function named BIOS Guardian is present, which protects the BIOS against viral infections.

It is possible to manually assign IRQs with this motherboard.

No option seems to have been provided which would allow the user to default back to the last valid set of BIOS values by simply hitting "Home", or "Insert". This forced us to constantly resort to resetting the BIOS via a jumper in order to perform our Overclocking tests.

Next: Additional features.