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Posted by
Paul
"Crazyace" Bouthiller on April 08, 2002
Manufacturer: FIC
Product: VC15
i845 DDR motherboard
Look
for FIC
VC15 prices OR the motherboard
price list.
The 1.6 P4
Northwood is one of today’s most overclockable chips. With
average yields hovering between 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz, it’s no
wonder why Intel is back on the hardware enthusiast’s map.
FIC boards have typically been missing most of
today’s needed overclocking options, but the VC15 does
manage to come with enough to increase benchmark yields
significantly.
There are NO
voltage adjustments included in the bios, which is about the
worst news of all. After reading about different voltage
mods, I decided to mod the board to have a default voltage
of 1.7volts. It’s a very simple process, and took about 5
minutes. This voltage mod enabled me to push the 1.6 to a
respectable 2.128MHz (133MHz FSB). Now, this may not seem
like an exciting overclock, but it is extremely stable. One
other major thing that is missing is the ability to change
FSB settings in 1MHz increments, which is standard in most
i845 boards. You have choices which are:
100/102/105/126/130/133/136/166/200. Even if they provided
more options, I was limited to a 133MHz FSB because there
were no voltage adjustments for my DDR RAM. I used the RAM
on other systems, and was able to achieve speeds of 200MHz,
but this required a bit of voltage. Let’s now concentrate
on bandwidth, because we have all heard how hungry these P4
chips can be.
The board does
offer two different ram frequencies, PC2000 and PC2600. Yes,
this means that you can run the ram at a 3:4 ratio. The
ratio stays locked, so you can run it all the way up to 200
MHz, even though your chip probably won’t make it. The one
setting that I would have like to see is 150MHz FSB; this
would yield a 200MHz memory speed for those of you with
good, quality DDR.
Well, to sum
things up, I decided to run the chip at a 133MHz FSB. I kept
the memory at PC2600, so the ram ran at 150MHz. This was the
highest I go could with the available settings, but provided
a very stable system with exceptional performance. On a side
note, previous to this board I had an Asus P4B266 board
installed in the same system, and ran it at the same
settings. There are many i845 motherboards that do not allow
memory settings of 3:4 to be utilized at speeds above
133MHz, and the Asus was one of them. Running your clock
lower to obtain higher memory bandwidth is ideal when using
a Pentium 4 system, and proves to provide better
performance.
The VC15 motherboard performed flawless
in all tests, and did not crash at all during my week of
brutal torture. Even with stock cooling, the overclocked
system ran cool and stable, and provided smooth gameplay in
every game I tossed at it. The impressive memory bandwidth
allowed me to decode 90 min. movies in about an hour, a task
that would take my old Pentium 3 machine over four hours
(note: depends on quality). For about $111 on Pricewatch,
you can have yourself an i845 chipset equipped motherboard
with on-board sound and a LAN controller! And remember, this
is a board that can almost run toe to toe with an Asus
P4B266 (w/o LAN), which retails for about $150! I actually
sold my P4B266 when I received this motherboard, because the
performance was so similar.
Like I said in my opening paragraph,
there are a lot of different motherboards and chipsets
available for the Pentium 4. For those of you who are on a
budget, want the legendary stability of Intel’s i845
chipset, and just don’t trust offerings from SiS or VIA,
the FIC VC15 is perfect! For the hungry overclocker, boards
like the Abit BD7 and Epox 4BDA2 offer better overclocking
options, but will cost more.
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Pros:
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Cons:
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No AGP clip
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Annoying Antivirus selection process
at startup
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Lack of voltage adjustments (Vcore/Mem/AGP)
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Lack of FSB 1MHz increments
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