FIC AD11 Review :: Installation

Setup for the CPU and FSB settings are achieved by the manual adjustment of the CPU Voltage and Multiplier switches located to the immediate left of the memory banks. They are shown in the close up photo below.

I first installed the CPU, cooling solution, and RAM onto the motherboard before mounting it on the test station. This makes it easier to work with than trying to work on it while the board is mounted.

 

The motherboard is secured by the six insulated screw holes that are located on the AD11 and you do not need additional washers as the holes are already insulated to provide you with a ground free installation.

The only setting that need to be made are on the motherboard itself. There are advanced setup options that can be adjusted inside the BIOS, but for posting you need only set the jumpers on the motherboard.

Setup is very easy to achieve with the AD11 there are no obstacles to be wary about in the setup procedure and is all in all a fairly simple affair that can be done by most anyone new or old to building their system.

The cables were connected to both the motherboard and their appropriate counterparts with the hard drive being the primary master on IDE channel one and the CD set as the master on the secondary drive. I no longer use floppy drives and now use a Win ME CD to boot off of so I did not connect the floppy drive to the system.

I have said this before and don't want to repeat myself but this is very important issue in regards to your systems performance. Remember the IDE chain always defaults to the slowest drive on the chain so if you connect the CD ROM or Zip device as a slave to your primary hard drive it will operate at the slower ATA33 or PIO mode instead of the proper and higher performance ATA100 standard.

During the installation of the operating system I had no problems and it took about twenty minutes of total time to accomplish. After the primary OS was installed I immediately installed the drivers on the CD for optimal system results and then after a few restarts I proceeded to install the video drivers.

The testing software was then installed and after another restart I began the next phase of this review, the testing. The bottom line on the installation is that it is a very straightforward procedure that can be accomplished by amateurs as well as professionals making it a good beginners motherboard. For someone building their first system and does not want a headache as their first project this is a good starting point.