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Posted by
Paul
"Crazyace" Bouthiller on December 21, 2001
Manufacturer: FIC
Product: FR33E
(VIA PLE133 based) motherboard
Check
for FR33E
prices OR the motherboard
price index.
The board comes with an Award BIOS. One
feature found on this board is automatic processor
detection, which automatically stores parameters for the
processor in which the system is equipped with. This can
make things very easy, yet be a bit annoying to a more
experienced user. There are no settings in the BIOS for
changing FSB, multiplier, voltage, etc. Annoying, yes, but
let’s remember that this board is not intended to be
overclocked. With that said, it worked flawlessly with a
couple of different chips I tried.
There is one cool feature found in the
bios that should add a little zip to your system. As with
most VIA chipset equipped Socket 370 motherboards, the
memory bus can be either raised or lowered by 33 MHz (DRAM
clock). This is intended to help out the poor Celeron by
letting the RAM run at a 100Mhz bus while the processor
chugs at 66Mhz (previous to 800Mhz models).
The mainboard is also equipped with
NOVUS. This basically provides you with direct access to
certain sub-menu’s within the bios by using easy keys. A
quick example is during boot-up, if you depress CTRL+C you
will enter the clock settings menu. Or, pressing CTRL+P will
load up the performance default settings and restart. This
makes building systems relatively easy and quick when
familiar with the keys.
Test
System
The only benchmarks I am going to
include are some SiSoft Sandra scores. Running games on this
system provided very low frame rates, which was pretty
expected. A faster chip could help to raise scores up a
little, possibly enough to play some games at 640x480.
Motocross Madness ran at about 20FPS at 640x480, which was
absolutely horrible. Anyways, here is what Sandra says:
Ouch, a little bit lower than expected.
Well, by now we already know that this is no speed demon.
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