Friday, January 14, 2000

Introduction

While the general flow of things has been to phase-out Slot 1 motherboards in favor of Socket 370 designs, Fic - with its KW15 board - has offered support not only of the latter, but also offered an additional measure of versatility by supporting Slot 1. Thus, the Fic KW15 supports not only the totality of the Pentium II & III families, but also PPGA processors - such as the Celeron as well as FC-PGA Coppermine processors . Based upon the i810E chipset, the Fic KW15 is effectively an all-in-one solution, that includes an AC"97 sound-card, and a 3D OpenGL graphic card with 4MB of cache memory; both of which are integrated into the board's circuits. The Fic KW15 also offers support for PC100, and PC133 memory. Now then, with that out of the way, let's cut through the smalltalk, and get down to the business of analyzing this board.

The Features

Expansion possibilities of the Fic KW15 are taken care of by its 5 PCI slots, and single AMR (connector included). No ISA, or AGP connectors are provided. A version that includes an optional ISA slot will also be made available, according to the manufacturers specifications. Finally, 2 on-board 168-pin DIMM sockets allow for a maximum of 512MB of memory to be installed.

Configuration of the KW15 is accomplished through an ensemble of BIOS functions. There are, though, a few jumpers to be found on the board itself. For instance, jumper JP4 permits the setting of the processor's speed through the BIOS. In such a case as the board refuses to boot, short-circuiting this jumper allows the board to be booted into "safe-mode", where the user is allowed to jump into the BIOS to make the necessary corrections. Jumper JP9 can be used to limit access to the "Top Block" of the BIOS, in case of a virus attack. This protection, which must be turned Off the BIOS is flashed, guards the safety of that part of the BIOS which boots the system. Finally, a jumper that truly deserves mention is JP1. The setting of this jumper will allow the system to reboot a certain time after a failed boot session. As you might note, these three jumpers are not standard equipment on other boards, but are an extra touch added by the team at Fic.

As for the Fic KW15's available operating frequencies, they include: 66Mhz, 68.5Mhz, 75Mhz, 83.5Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 100Mhz, 103Mhz, 112Mhz, 124Mhz, 133Mhz, and 150Mhz with clock multipliers of between 3X, and 8X in steps of .5X.

Finally, the KW15 allows for the memory bus to be set to 100Mhz, or 133Mhz; as well as adjustment of the video cache.

Additional features found on the Fic KW15, include: Wake on LAN, Wake on Modem Ring, PS/2 connectors, USB connectors, RX/TX infrared connectors, Power Failure Recovery, an AMR connector, start-up from the keyboard/mouse/or at a pre-set time, as well as hardware monitoring of fan speed, CPU temperature, and voltages (available only as options, according to the manufacturers specifications).

Also note that the KW15 implements dynamic assignment technology for video memory.

With all that, the Fic KW15 meets the requirements of the PC99 standard.

Below, a picture of the Fic KW15 provides a clear view of its components.

Installation

As with the majority of "jumperless" motherboards, installation of the KW15 proves to be quite simple. There is no real need to position jumpers as the default setting will do in the majority of cases. In such a case as the Socket 370 is to be used, it's necessary to first remove the contacts on JP2, and JP10. After that, it's simply a matter of verifying adjustments in the BIOS, to assure everything is properly optimized. Finally, it is necessary to implement the included patch for the i810e chipset once your OS is installed. The patch is included on the installation CD, along with drivers for the graphics card, and the sound card. Once the patch is applied it's then necessary to enable the DMA check box of the disk drives in the device manager, in order for this feature to be taken in charge by the disk controller installed by Windows.

Important Note

In such a case as you install an Intel Coppermine FC-PGA processor, a special adapter - included with the KW15 - must be installed in the slot 1 connector. If the adapter isn't installed, you can expect nothing but problems; believe me...

The software bundle

The installation CD, includes: patches for the i810e chipset, audio/video drivers, the LogoGenie utility, and the hardware monitoring program 1stAid. A second CD contains 3 applications from Symantec, namely: Norton Antivirus, Norton Ghost, and Norton VirtualDrive.

Next: The test results.