Wednesday, June 16, 1999

The performance tests results

The tests were all performed under Win98.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: Fic PA2013
CPU: AMD K6-2 3Dnow 400Mhz
Memory: 64mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: AOpen CD-ROM drive CD-936E
AGP port: STB VElocity 4400 TNT 16Mb SDRAM AGP
OS: Win98 built 4.10
DirectX 6

Winbench 99 CPUmark

The CPU bench CPUmark 99 of Winbench 99 demonstrates that this motherboard reaches performances truly very interesting. In fact, as one can observes, the Fic PA2013 has exceeded all the other boards tested on this bench except the Gigabyte GA-5AX with which it has made tie.

Winstone 99

On this test, each motherboard has been tested 3 time, but only the highest results has been retained for each of them. As we can see, the FIC PA 2013 takes the leading position immediately closely followed by the SOYO SY-5EMA+, while the other cards are lagging behind.

Video sub-system tests

Here again, the PA2013 demonstrates the best performances among all the results obtained during normal use.

However, this motherboard, for reasons that escape to me, didn't profited of the K6-2 Overclocked to 450Mhz as well as the Gigabyte GA-5AX did.

Disks sub-system tests

In this test, results with and without the Highpoint XStore Pro drivers have been included. The best results have been obtained after the installation of XStore Pro as we can observe by a slight improvement of the hard disk drive performance after the installation of this software.

The below evaluation table is showing the strong points and the weak points of the tested motherboard. No need to remember to you that we never buy a motherboard only for its performances. Most of today's motherboards are exhibiting performances very close to each others. Therefore, we need additional information in order to help us distinguish what are the real advantages of a motherboard compared to the others and this is exactly where is coming into help this evaluation table.

The score obtained by this motherboard is 89 points out of 100. The FIC PA 2013 suffers therefore of some tad gaps impossible to pass under silence and that are detailed in the weak points chapter. However, we should consider that the PA2013 is not a bad motherboard especially when considering the high performance level it demonstrates.

The strong points

The strong points of FIC PA2013 motherboard are: its excellent expansion possibilities and its high level of performances.

The weak points

The weak points of this motherboard are : the generalized weakness of its components layout that could have been much better organized. For instance, the jumpers to set the clock frequency are very badly placed that once the board is in place with all the connectors plugged in, it is very difficult to reach them. On the other hand, according to what I have been able to observe, the PA2013 is a very unstable board and I had to run Winstone 99 more than 20 times to obtain 3 valid results. Finally, all the jumpers of the PA2013 are not able to compete with the Overclocking possibilities of most of the motherboards using the jumperless Soft Menu design.

Conclusions

The FIC PA2013 motherboard appears to me far more destined to experienced users rather than to beginners. Despite of superb performances, the paint is spoiled by a lack of stability rarely met on other mainboards of this type that I have tested up to now. Overclocking test to 450Mhz with 4.5 X by 100Mhz have given good results but It has been totally impossible for me to boot the system by using 112Mhz by 4 X. In a word, although the PA2013 is one of the most efficient Super 7motherboard that it has been given to me to test until today, I would not risk to recommend it to anyone that has not a good idea of what he/she stepping-in...

For all additional information, visit the Web of Fic.