Wednesday, June 16, 1999

Introduction

FIC, one of the greatest motherboard manufacturers in the world, possesses a notoriety that a lot of others manufacturers envy. Born of the know-how and of the vast experience of this manufacturer, the PA2013 motherboard, based on the VIA MVP3 chipset, is a super 7 offering a lot of very interesting features. However, I must say that this is not a board for newbies and/or beginners because its configuration is rather complicated. According to this, the PA2013 would be more suited to the experienced users for whom the installation and the configuration of a mainboard no longer presents a mystery. Since the last (and very numerous) upgrade of the Bios, the PA2013 now supports the whole range of AMD K6-2 and K6-3 processors. As shown in the title of this article, the version I have tested was a 2Mb L2 cache but two other versions are available with respectively 512 K and 1 Mb L2 cache. Without any delay, let's make the tour of this motherboard.

The features

The Fic PA2013 has 4 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots and 1 AGP port. We also find three 168 pins DIMM sockets allowing up to 768Mb of memory. Except for the second ISA slot and the fifth PCI slot (because of the presence of the connectors for the accessories of the front control panel of the case), all others slots can accept extra-long cards. By the way, the accessories connectors are positioned with the pins oriented on the side instead to be oriented upwards as it is normally the case. This implies to preferably connect the accessories before to install the motherboard in the casing because once in place it can be more complicated to do it.

The clock frequencies are spanning from 66Mhz to 124Mhz, including: 66Mhz, 68Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 112Mhz and 124Mhz.

The available multipliers are going from 2X to 5.5X in steps of 0.5X. The voltage of the CPU core can be varied between 1.8 and 3.5 volts in steps of 0.1 volt.

As you can see, the flexibility of the PA2013 is a tad limited in terms of Overclocking capabilities mostly because the choice of the clock frequencies and multipliers is rather poor.

Additional features one can find are including: the Wake on LAN, PS2 keyboard and mouse connectors, USB connectors, keyboard power on, voltage and the temperature control of the processor and the hardware monitoring.

Below, an excellent photography of the Fic PA2013 motherboard gives us a good view on its components layout.

Installation

Installing this mainboard is not really easy. Indeed, multiples jumpers have to be correctly positioned. Furthermore, this motherboard is very particular about the configuration of the BIOS in relationship with the memory timing settings. Hereafter, I present you the configuration setup that has allowed me to obtain the best results and I strongly suggest that you to stick to it because any gap to this configuration reduced practically to zero all chances to correctly boot.