Friday, January 28, 2000

Introduction

Fic, one of the world's most prolific makers of motherboards, didn't lose any time in designing, and marketing, an AMD Athlon motherboard. This despite the looming shadow of Intel, which has all but scared stiff the majority manufacturers of even entertaining the idea to built an Athlon mobo. So then, Fic stands among the first three manufacturers to take the Athlon bandwagon, and it is to Fic's very own SD11 motherboard that we turn our attention now.

The features

To start off, I have to mention that the SD11 implements the AMI BIOS, and - contrary to the Gigabyte GA-71X that we reviewed earlier - the Fic SD11 does not use the full set of Irongate chips developed by AMD, but only pieces of that chipset, combined with chips from VIA. The Northbridge, thus, is an AMD751, while the Southbridge is a VIA 686A. All told, this combination proves somewhat more efficient than the AMD750 Irongate chipset.

Another thing to note is that this chipset combination - along with the Irongate set itself - does not support 4X AGP. Even so, the loss of 4X AGP is no great detriment to the performance of Athlon boards, as the 4X standard typically adds only 1% of performance value over 2X AGP, which is supported.

Expansion of the SD11 is made possible via its 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, and single AGP port. As well, 3 168-pin DIMM sockets provide parking space for 768MB of memory.

At first glance, the SD11 stands out as enormous, and could easily be mistaken for a dual-processor motherboard - if only for its size. So, not only will many casings not be able to contain this behemoth, but they'd neither be capable of supplying it with sufficient current for its many components. On item to note, is that Fic chose not to install 8 regulators, as did Gigabyte on the GA-71X , but only 4 voltage regulators, probably a question of economy here... However, each of the SD11's regulators sport their own heatsink, though, as is the case with AMD's Fester reference board.

Configuration of the SD11 is nearly identical to that of the GA-71X, as there are no adjustments available for the processor. In other word, the SD11 has no processor's configuration jumper, and also lacks BIOS options for setting the bus frequency, or the clock multiplier. Thus, with the Fic SD11, users can only obtain a frequency of 100Mhz for the main system bus; this making it impossible to Overclock the processor from the board.

Finally, as with the GA-71X, there are a series of options for adjusting memory timings; the principal among them being:

SDRAM PH Limit: Specify the number of consecutive page-hit requests to allow before choosing a
                              non-page-hit request .

SDRAM Idle Limit: Specify the number of idle cycles to wait before precharging an idle-bank.

SDRAM Trc Timing Value: This function specifies the minimum time between activate to activate of the
                                          same bank.

SDRAM Trp Timing Value: This function specifies the delay between a precharge command and an
                                           Activate command.

SDRAM Tras Timing Value: This function specifies the minimum SRAS[2.0] active time.

SDRAM Cas latency: This function specifies the delay from SRAS[2.0] to data valid.

SDRAM Trcd Timing Value: This function specifies the delay between activating a bank, and the moment
                                             at which a write or read command will be accepted.

Next: Additional features.