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Overclocking
I
went into very good detail about overclocking the AD11 previously. I'd love
to see all the overclocking options controllable from within the BIOS but
you have to give FIC a lot of credit for giving us such a great package. So
what did the AMD 1.2 GHz get up to? 1.3 GHz was unstable although I did reach
the Windows desktop. I settled for 1.25 for everyday use. As soon as I can
cut the lower fins on the Thermaltake Super Orb we'll go for another run at
1.3 GHz and beyond.
Software
FIC has thrown
together a very respectable software suite to accompany their motherboard.
Let's start with the commercial stuff: Norton Ghost, Norton Antivirus 2000,
and Norton Virtual Drive are all supplied on their own disk. On the driver
CD are quite a few useful programs. You'll find a hardware monitoring program
to keep track of your CPU and Adobe Acrobat to name a couple. Pretty tame
you are thinking. How about a utility that allows you to overclock your CPU
from within Windows? I couldn't believe it took this long for someone to come
up with that. Unfortunately, that feature wasn't ready for primetime as I
couldn't get it to work. As soon as that feature is working I doubt we'll
overclock from the BIOS or jumpers again.
Conclusions
The
FIC AD11 is the first motherboard I've worked with that supports the AMD 266
MHz CPUs. The AOpen AK73 claimed it could but in actual use it did not. Throw
in the move up to DDR memory and we are talking about a sweet board.
Is it perfect? No, but its faults
were easy enough to live with. Many boards have both jumpers and support for
overclocking in their BIOS. Perhaps we'll see the AD11 get such a BIOS upgrade
if the Windows overclocking utility isn't working soon.
I
went into very good detail about overclocking the AD11 previously. I'd love
to see all the overclocking options controllable from within the BIOS but
you have to give FIC a lot of credit for giving us such a great package. So
what did the AMD 1.2 GHz get up to? 1.3 GHz was unstable although I did reach
the Windows desktop. I settled for 1.25 for everyday use. As soon as I can
cut the lower fins on the Thermaltake Super Orb we'll go for another run at
1.3 GHz and beyond.
The
FIC AD11 is the first motherboard I've worked with that supports the AMD 266
MHz CPUs. The AOpen AK73 claimed it could but in actual use it did not. Throw
in the move up to DDR memory and we are talking about a sweet board. 
