First International Computer (FIC) sent over a budget-oriented motherboard based on the SiS 748 chipset for Athlon XP CPUs. It supports all Socket A chips, up to and including the Barton 3200+. It is aimed at the budget-builder market, a spot that has been dominated for the last few years by the ECS K7S5A, which sold very well and provided a good value for the price. The FIC board, has many of the same features, and is aimed for the same market. However, it has many features over the ECS board, such as support for PC3200 DDR RAM, AGP8x support, optional 5.1 onboard audio, up to 400MHz FSB, and USB 2.0.
As you can see, this board has pretty standard features. As it is marketed as a budget board, it lacks things like Serial-ATA and hardware RAID, but those are things that people looking for a budget board are probably not concerned about. Below is a complete list of specifications from FIC’s website.
Processor
– AMD Athlon, AMD Athlon XP & AMD Duron
Front Side Bus(MHz)
– 400/333/266/200
Chipset
– SiS 748
System Memory
– (3) 184-pin DDR DIMM Sockets (2.5v)
– DDR 400/333/266/200 ( PC3200/2700/2100/1600)
– Support for up to 3GB (2GB PC3200)
Expansion Slots
– (1) AGP 8x, supports 1.5v Slot
– (5) PCI (PCI 2.2 compliant)
Onboard IDE
– (2) ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE
Onboard FDD
– (1) Floppy Disk Drive (FDD) Connector (Supports Modes, 1.2/1.44/2.88 mb)
Onboard Audio
– 5.1 Channel Integrated Audio (optional w/header)
– AC’97 CODEC
Onboard Ethernet
– Integrated 10/100
Onboard I/O
– 6 USB 2.0/1.1 (4 onboard/2 extra with header)
– Wake-on-LAN
Back Panel Connectors
– (1) PS/2 Mini-DIN keyboard Port
– (1) PS/2 Mini-DIN Mouse Port
– (4) USB 2.0 / 1.1
– (1) Parallel (25-Pin Female 1284 IEEE Bi-Directional SPP/EPP/ECP mode)
– (2) Serial (RS-232 Standard 9-Pin Male, 16550 UART compatible)
– (3) Audio jacks (Line-Out/Line-In/Microphone)
– (1) RJ-45 Ethernet port
First off, let’s start with the box which has a 3D futuristic look to it. It’s a nice looking box with plenty of info about the board.
The board comes with all the standard stuff, not pictured but included. We’ve got the manual, USB headers (for 2 more USB ports), floppy cable, I/O plate, and a quick reference guide which shows the board and basically how to install it. The motherboard has a pretty standard I/O layout with serial, parallel, PS/2, USB, sound, and LAN. Unfortunately, I did not receive the extra header that allows this motherboard to have 5.1 audio, so onboard audio is confined only to stereo.
The RAM slots, IDE connectors, and ATX connector are all all in a good location. In the second picture we can see the northbridge (under the heatsink) and the 12v power connector. As you can see there is a passive heatsink on the northbridge to keep it cool. I prefer the passive heatsinks on the northbridge just because it does not add any additional noise to the system.
This board uses an Award BIOS and the main screen is pretty much standard. The power management setup section is mainly for setting how you want the motherboard to power on and off.
The first shot is of the advanced chipset features screen, which includes RAM timings and AGP settings. Although this board has the option for AGP 8x in the BIOS, I could never get it to work in Windows. I use an ATI Radeon 9700 video card, which has the SmartGart options for setting AGP options, and even though I enabled 8x in the BIOS it would always say AGP was off. I don’t know if this is a bug in the BIOS or the ATi software, but its there, and I think that it affects performance significantly as you will see in the Benchmarking section. Others who have reviewed this motherboard have not brought up this problem, so I am thinking it might be a compatibility issue with my setup. The second screen is the RAM options screen where you can change the RAM speeds. The options are rather limited, and there is no option for raising the RAM above 400MHz asynchronously from the front side bus.
Below is the Frequency/Voltage control options, which should have been called solely Frequency Control, since there are no options for adjusting any voltage settings. This is a major hindrance for overclocking, but then again this is a budget board and is not meant for overclocking. The CPU speed settings are also very limited, and you cannot adjust it with 1-MHz increments as in most enthusiast boards. It goes from 133 to 140, then to 157, with nothing in between.
Now to the part you have all been waiting for, benchmarking. SiS is aiming this chipset at the VIA KT400A/KT600 chipsets, at least in their whitepapers. So I decided to pit it against an older KT400 board, the Epox 8K9A2+, which was and still is an incredible board for Athlon XP CPUs.
| Motherboards: | FIC KT-748 |
| Epox 8K9A2+ | |
| Processor: | Athlon XP 2400+ |
| Memory: | 512MB Corsair PC3200 CAS 2.5 |
| Video Card: | FIC ATI Radeon 9700 |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional |
| Video card drivers: | ATi Catalyst 4.9 beta drivers |
| Benchmarks: | SiSoft Sandra |
| 3DMark2001 | |
| 3DMark03 | |
| Doom 3 |
SiSoft Sandra – Memory
Using SiSoft Sandra I tested to see how well the motherboard handles memory and the bandwidth you can expect from it. Remember that this is a single channel memory architecture, so there’s no way to use 2 DIMMs for greater speeds. There is a slight difference here with the edge being given to the KT400 board. I was surprised by this, because in SiS’s whitepapers for this chipset they claimed a higher transport bandwidth than the KT400 board, but it just doesn’t translate into performance in this benchmark. The difference is very small, practically negligible.
Futuremark 3DMark2001
Next, lets take a look at the old standby, 3DMark2001. All tests were run at 1024×768 with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled. Here, we have a small difference, with the lead going to the KT400 board. It seems that the lack of AGP 8x being enabled on the FIC board is hampering its performance, as the video card is not getting as much bandwidth to crunch data with.
Futuremark 3DMark03
With 3DMark03 we see about a 500 point difference, or about 12%, which is pretty significant. This seems to be a trend with these two boards. Once again I believe the AGP settings have something to do with this.
Doom 3
Last up in the 3D benchmarks we have Doom 3 from id Software. As I’m sure you all know this game has the most technologically advanced commercial gaming engine around. It uses normal mapping, bump mapping, real-time shadows, the whole shebang. I set the graphics settings to medium detail, which still looks awesome, and ran the benchmark 3 times and took the last score, since Doom 3 likes to warm up apparently. Here we see a much larger difference in the scores, with the FIC board dropping dramatically behind. I really don’t have an explanation for this, but since this game is so graphic-card intensive I would say it’s probably the same thing as the others. I would be interested in seeing scores from someone who could get the AGP 8x to work correctly and analyze the delta.
Because this board is intended to be a budget motherboard the overclocking options are scarce to none. Like we saw in the BIOS there are no voltage options and the FSB is only able to be increased to 140MHz and 157MHz. Also with the multiplier being locked to 15 the system will become unstable faster than if it had the ability to go lower. So began the overclocking process which wasn’t fun at all to say the least. I was able to get to the 140MHz overclock with few issues however 157MHz was impossible due to the limited features that the board had. Keep in mind of course that this is a budget motherboard and not intended to be a top overclocker.
Conclusion
I believe that this board fits well within the market space it is aimed at, mainly the budget builder market. While not a stellar performer, it does support many of the newer technologies that many older boards with similar prices may not. The ability to use the 400MHz front side bus Athlons is a big plus, as is support for PC3200 memory. I would recommend this board to someone looking to build an entry to mid level gaming PC, but not to the budget overclocker as the lack of overclocking options make it a very poor performer in that respect. If the price is right, and you are looking for a replacement for the aging ECS K7S5A with support for newer features then this is the board to buy, at least for the moment. I give this board a 7.5, and would like to thank FIC for sending it out to us.
Pros
- Good Price
- Decent performer
- Supports newest 32-bit AMD processors
- Supports PC3200 and AGP 8x
Cons
- Lack of overclocking options
- Problems with AGP 8x not being enabled in Windows