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FIC AZ11E Review :: Features
The AZ11-E is an 8.5" x 12" ATX form factor motherboard built on a four-layer virgin PCB (printed circuit board). The AZ11-E motherboard is based around the VIA Apollo Northbridge KT133 & the Southbridge 686B chipset by Intel's major chipset rival. This motherboard supports the AMD Duron Socket A 600~800MHz and the AMD Athlon Socket A 700MHz~1.2GHz processors. There are a wide array of CPUs that can be utilized with this motherboard, making the AZ11-E very flexible in this respect. The AZ11-E also has 3 DIMM slots with support for up to 1.5GB of PC-133 SDRAM. This is plenty of RAM support, even for the power users' needs. The onboard features of the AZ11-E are the integrated audio that comes imbedded on the VIA 686B chipset (audio can be disabled in BIOS). It also has five PCI slots, one 4X AGP port, and one CNR riser for your future upgrades and expandability options. It also has 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, 1 each PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, 2 USB connectors, and a 2 port front USB pin-header supporting a total of four USB ports. It also has one media connector (line-in, line-out, mic-in, game port). And for your hard drive and other IDE devices it has two independent ATA100 IDE controllers with support for DMA Mode 2/4/5, controlling of up to four devices at one time. For your system monitoring and diagnostics, the motherboard is ACPI ready (STD). These tools can come in handy for protection of your computer through hardware monitoring. These features include temperature/voltage and system fan speed monitoring and control. There is also a hardware-based intelligent anti-virus protection which is BIOS-based, and an auto power failure recovery (APFR) feature to help when your computer fails due to a power outage. Another nice feature is the audio voice alert, which speaks to you via a voice chip you connect to the motherboard. What this feature does is let you know of any problems the motherboard may encounter upon boot up of the system. This is a cool feature, though it is kind of eerie hearing a human voice come out of your computer. This is a clean motherboard, and has ample features to satisfy even the most picky end user. I liked this motherboard's layout, and the human voice thing is quite a good feature to have, also. We are getting closer to having a fully talking system everyday. Star Trek here we come. Let's see how it performs in the benchmarks and move on to that part of the review. Shall we? Package Contents 1 Motherboard
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