Monday, January 24, 2000

Introduction

It was great surprise that I took on the analysis of the Fic KA-11. Fic has long habituated its customers to austere boards, without any great embellishments. This time, however, it seems that Fic has seen fit to present their boards with a bit more flash. For example, the KA-11, which arrived along with the KW15 and SD11 which I will be reviewing shortly, ships with a better designed box and packaging than previous boards. What's more, Fic delivers a software bundle that puts its former offerings to shame by now including 3 Norton applications with all their new boards (at least for the 3 models mentioned here). Even the board's components seem to have a bit more kick in them. In short, Fic seems to have genuinely considered the criticisms levied at it in the past, and taken a constructive look at its product line. That said, let's now take a look in detail, at the new KA-11 motherboard.

The Features

The KA-11 expendability is ensured through its 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, and one AGP port. As well, 4 on-board 168-pin DIMM sockets allow for a maximum of 1GB of memory to be installed

Configuration of the KA-11 takes a bit more dexterity than a 100% jumperless board, as Fic doesn't seem to have divested itself completely of jumpers, in favor of BIOS functionalities. Thus, configuration of the KA-11 is accomplished from a series of DIP switches in order to set the clock multiplier, while bus speed is determined from the BIOS sub-menu labeled "Chipset Features Setup". Another BIOS feature found in the "Chipset Features Setup" menu, permits the user to set the operating frequency of the memory to a setting equal to that of the main bus, and to add or subtract 33Mhz from that number.

Available clock frequencies, include: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 100Mhz, 103Mhz, 112Mhz, 124Mhz, 133Mhz, 140Mhz and 150Mhz. Clock multipliers are available from 3.5X to 7.5X in steps of .5X.

Next: Additional features.