Overclocking
When
we think of overclocking we don't typically think of FIC. Take heart friends,
included on the board is a jumper to allow FSB manipulation. What is unusual is
that in the manual this jumper is referred to as "for future ratio-unlocked
CPU use". Maybe FIC knows something that we don't. AMD, if you are listening,
we'd love to have unlocked CPUs again! Also included with this board is a jumper
for CPU core voltage manipulation. That's a feature many a motherboard manufacturer
would shy away from including. One
nice feature I found in the BIOS was the inclusion of 4 bank interleave for memory
tweaking. Every motherboard should have this option but many do not. Another welcome
feature is the inclusion of BIOS based FSB manipulation. BTW - the pic on this
page must have been an early production version of the board. Different PCB color
and jumpers above the southbridge.
I
got up to 140 MHz with the AN11 which is not as good as the 155 MHz FSB that I
had with the Soltek SL-75DRV2. As pointed out to me by a reader the AN11 also
doesn't feature DDR memory voltage tweaks nor does it have AGP voltage adjustments
like the Soltek board so I consider this board a candidate for light overclocking.
Software
I've
already mentioned the included CD with Norton Antivirus, Norton Personal Firewall,
and Norton Ghost. All are worthwhile products and their inclusion sweetens the
AN11's package.
Conclusions
The
Soltek SL-75DRV2 narrowly beat the FIC AN11 in every benchmark. We have to factor
in at this point the fact that the AN11 offers many features that other boards
don't. The inclusion of on-board IDE RAID, the second ATA-100 IDE ribbon cable
to enable RAID, the extra USB ports, and the outstanding stability I experienced
with the AN11 give it a lot of merit. FIC is doing a very good job of building
a product for a niche market who wants very flexible storage management while
still offering competitive performance at a very reasonable price. It isn't the
overclocking monster that the SL-75DRV2 is but those of you who will base your
purchase on other areas should give this board a serious looking at.
Victor
Oshiro January 28, 2002
