On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, you wrote:
> I am thinking about buying an Athlon motherboard.
> I would welcome comments (goor and bad) about the
> ones out there. I would probably run 800MHz. I
> would like to have at least one ide socket for my
> sound card. Please advise if you have good/bad to
> say about any particular boards.
>
>
I have never been as impressed by any other Motherboard as I am by the AZ11
from FIC. I would not hesitate to recommend it in the basis of my experience
for either socket A chip, the Duron 600, 650 or 700, or any speed of the Athlon
Thunderbird. My little DUron 600 with its clock forced to 600 instead of
freewheeling will outbenchmark a Xeon IIIB 700. The Athlon T-Bird series at
800 and 850 rival the P-III coppermine at 1GHz, and the 900 outperforms it.
Performance considerations aside, I am running cool when the board works its
way up to the optimum, which for my setup turned out to be about 672 or 112%
rated speed. I have PC133 SDRAM on board and somehow this little board manages
TWO fetches per cycle so its FSB really runs at twice the memory bus speed. I
would love to know more about that, and I am fairly certain it really does so
else I could not beat this Xeon on some throughput tasks, because it is clocked
higher and is nearly equal in pure processor performance with the edge to the
Xeon, but the Duron is surrounded with better support and runs at 37C pretty
constantly
And I bought FIC because it was the only Socket A board available to me. Now I
am wondering if I will buy any other Socket A brand. I thought FIC was a
"slightly above average on SUper-7" with poor to fair performance in the BX
Chipsets, but this one showed me how wrong conclusions about "brand"
technologies can be. FIC outdid themselves and everyone else with this AZ11
Board.
Civileme
