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The FIC AD11 is an ATX form factor motherboard that sizes in at 8.8" x 12" and is based around the new AMD 761 chipset which has proven to be a winner on other boards based on the same chipset which showed high benchmarks along with very good 3D results. The AD11 also utilizes the VIA Southbridge 686B chipset for your audio needs. With the AMD 761 chipset comes support for the Socket A Duron processors in speeds from 600~800MHz with a 200MHz FSB and the Athlon processors in speeds of 700MHz~1.3GHz with a 200MHz FSB including the latest 1GHz~1.33GHz Athlon CPUs with a 266MHz FSB. Supporting the latest PC2100 DDR SDRAM which means faster system performance all around the AD11 has two DDR DIMM slots supporting up to 1GB of DDR-SDRAM. Recently memory prices have taken a serious nose dive so picking up some new RAM should not be too costly an adventure in the present scheme of things. There are two independent enhanced PCI Bus Master IDE connectors supporting Ultra DMA modes 33/66/100. Remember that the drive chain defaults to the slowest drive in the chain therefore connecting a Zip drive or CD ROM player as a slave to your Ultra DMA100 hard drive will result in your hard drive running at the slower Ultra 33 mode speed instead of the proper Ultra100 speed in which is was designed for greatly decreasing your system performance For your inline card expansions the AD11 comes equipped with five PCI slots one universal 4X AGP slot and one CNR Slot which at the moment is a useless piece of hardware at the moment but eventually some company will be putting out reasonable products to be used in the CNR slot.
I have heard that Intel will be making a chipset called the Sound Max 3.0 which should be out later this year being integrated and manufactured by various vendors. I heard this product at the IDF and it is a very nice CNR product solving all your audio needs in a small digital card. You also get with the AD11 two onboard serial ports, one parallel port, one PS/2 mouse and keyboard connector, two USB connectors plus 1 USB front pin-header which supports an additional two devices and last but not least one media connector with a Line-in, Line-out, Mic-in, and MIDI Game port for music instruments and older game pads and joysticks. For listening to music and playing game the AD11 uses the VIA 686B Southbridge chipset that supports two channel audio and Direct sound and should suit the needs of the average user who is only using a two speaker or two speaker and subwoofer configuration as their audio system just fine.
The AD11 comes with an advanced BIOS that features Hardware Monitoring including Temperature/ Voltage/ System fan control monitoring along with a Hardware based intelligent anti-virus protection and Auto Power Failure Recovery for starting your system after a power outage. There is also support for wake on LAN (WOL) and wake on remote (WOR) along with a Keyboard/Mouse wake up feature. Included onboard is their NOVUS feature which includes many different system function tools including Clockometer, Overclock Partner, Hot Key, Logo Genie, BIOS Guardian, and optional-Audio Alert II. This motherboard has some nice features, but an onboard RAID controller would have been quite nice and added a little more gusto to the overall features of the board. Overall it comes across quite well and is an impressive product from the folks over at FIC. I think most users would be satisfied with this motherboard it does not have a whole lot of bells and whistles but it definitely gets the job done where it counts. Package Contents
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