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Posted by
Per
Hansson on October 22, 2002
Manufacturer: FIC
Product: AN17
KT333 motherboard
Manufacturer #2: Epox
Product #2: 8K3A+
KT333 motherboard
Find motherboard prices
here.
A
feature which made me quite irritated that it had not been
implemented on the 8K3A+ predecessor was support for the
built in thermal diode on Athlon XP processors. What this is
supposed to prevent is a processor which goes up in smoke
due to improper cooling, of which three general scenarios
can happen. Number one is that the fan on the heatsink
stops, the temperature will slowly rise until either the
chip fries or the more lucky way, that the system just
hangs, another thing that might happen is that the entire
heatsink falls of the processor, this is not something that
is impossible due to the fact that most heatsinks only uses
two of the total six cleats on the CPU Socket, of which I
complained on in my Socket A cooler roundup last year. If
for example you are playing a game it will just take around
two seconds before the core of the CPU reaches 300C. With
risk of fire as a result, this can be prevented by the diode
just like in the previous case by it constantly monitoring
the temperature and in the event that it passes the limit
(user selectable) the power from the power supply is cut and
thus an immediate shutdown is caused.
The
last scenario is when you cold start a computer without a
heatsink, this can be either due to you forgetting to
install the heatsink or doing it improperly so it doesn't
contact the core of the CPU, but also that the heatsink
comes loose during the night.
And
while Epox implementation (and to my knowing ALL current
Socket A mainboards with actual support for the built in
thermal diode in the Athlon) will rescue the computer in the
first two scenarios (i.e. when the system is up and running)
It will not have enough time to initialise when you could
boot the computer, with the end result that even though you
have a processor with thermal diode and a mainboard
supporting it the processor will get fried... It's neither
worth nothing that the FIC AN17 has no support at all for
the built in thermal diode in the Athlon XP.
The
BIOS chip itself is well placed on both mainboards right at
the edge of it where it will not require you to remove
expansion cards if you need to replace it.
Going
into the BIOS options, we could clearly notice that Epox has
given its customers more control; even with unusual
processor voltages of up to 2,2v, this mainboard has been
made to reach limits, if you have proper cooling of course
;). A regular heatsink with this voltage will have your CPU
fried in no time; water-cooling is the way to go should you
intend to increase your V-Core this much.
FIC's
AN17 BIOS options
The FIC
AN17 doesn't allow you to adjust the voltage inside the
BIOS, DIP switches are your only choice, and just like most
manufacturers they only offer you to go a maximum of 0,1v
above normal, which results in 1,85v… Multiplier settings
are neither present so if you were looking for that, Epox is
your name, offering settings from 6x all the way up to 15x.
vs. Epox's BIOS
Taking
a look to the advanced memory controls we were greeted with
the must-have feature for any KT333 mainboard, a 166 MHz
memory bus speed. However this feature is not very useful if
you don’t increase the FSB accordingly, using a /5 divider
at 166 MHz to keep your AGP and PCI BUS within limits.
The FIC
mainboard gave us a problem when trying to pursue
overclocking results using a higher frequency FSB though,
since it offers no multiplier support you will overclock
your processor if you move to a 166Mhz FSB, and quite much
at that to, my 1,46Ghz Athlon XP would become overclocked to
1,83Ghz if I would try this, a speed it will not be able to
run at with even watercooling... Your only choice here would
be to get hold of a Thoroughbred "B" processor in
the lower MHZ range and hope that it's .13 micron core will
give you the headroom to overclock this far, otherwise you
are out of luck on the FIC mainboard in regard to 166Mhz FSB.
Although
with the Epox mainboard all you have to do is connect the L1
bridges on the CPU and decrease the multiplier until the
chip becomes stable, or even is not overclocked at all, this
was what I did. I decreased the multiplier to 9x which times
166 yields only 1,5Ghz, just a 33 MHz overclock from my
default of 1,46Ghz, something to really keep in mind when
you are planning to buy one of these mainboards, and as you
will see in the benchmarks on the next page, the increase in
FSB can actually be worth it.
I also
ran into a bug here on the FIC AN17 mainboard, had it not
been for this bug this review would have gotten posted
several months back, but I was unable to solve it and thus
bought the Epox mainboard instead. Then after a while FIC
finally released a BIOS update which seemed to fix the
problem, if you would like to have yourself a laugh have a
look at this thread in our forums where I find out about
this bug. (After a few months of problem solving) ;-) I
informed FIC of this bug but got no reply sent to me but I
assume it was due to my mail they found out since the BIOS
was released a few weeks after I sent them that mail...
I will
not go into much more detail about the BIOS on these
mainboards; I will just say that the Epox offers much more
"tweak-ability" in their BIOS, which you can also
see if you compare the pictures of them here.
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