FIC K8-800T AMD 64 Motherboard

Review by Jason Jacobs on 05/12/04
Motherboard Provided by FIC

Bios Support:

The Award bios included with the FIC K8-800T is easy to navigate and fairly straight forward. Device selection, boot order, on chip devices and advanced features are all available without having to navigate more than one level deep. In tests performed at TWL the FIC has shown that it did not like to accept configurations that would force advanced timings or faster than default speed. While disappointing the FIC is not targeted towards overclockers and is more suited towards office work with a performance edge over standard 32bit processors.

Advanced Bios:
The Advanced Bios contains all the standard features you find to select boot priority, APIC, and other general options.

Advanced Chipset Features:
Here FIC choose to integrate some control over the system upstream, downstream and LDT bus frequency. Unfortunately the absence of a working PCI and AGP lock makes this function nice to look at but rather usless when combined with the lack of advanced overclocking features.

FIC also includes DRAM configuration menu, it allows you to change the memory speed to one of four settings: 100, 133,166, 200 Unfortunately all choices are below the PC3200 (DDR 400) rating of the board, once again limiting overclocking. It may help in making an unstable machine more stable by scaling back the DRAM speed but I would advise getting better ram if you find yourself actually utilizing this function.

On Chip PCI Devices:
FIC deviated from the norm when it choose the AC97 (ALC655) 6 channel audio and Realtek 8100C 10/100. The VIA chipset includes support for the Envy24 audio 8 channel sound and 3Comm gigabit Ethernet. Both of the options available on the FIC board are slightly less quality than the default chip supported by VIA, however, performance shouldnt suffer in either category. FIC choose the AC97 and Realtek Ethernet for proven support and the popularity of these chips. FIC also included support for USB 1.0, 2.0 and 1394 (firewire).

Frequency/Voltage Control:
The Award Bios provides a min of 200 and maximum of 232 for the cpu clock rate. Given the default multiplier of our 3000+ is 10, this means we could overclock our board to a maximum of 2320mhz if the PCI and AGP bus would allow such a rate which they do not. The PCI auto detect speed resulted in a locked system when disabled and the system was overclocked, further proof that VIA's PCI/AGP lock does not work. The AGP and DRAM voltage control is present but rather useless as the system doesnt allow for enough overclocking to make this feature useful. It is worthy to note that the FIC K8-800T was extremely stable at default speeds, taking every program we threw at it without error. Memtest, Sisoft, 3Dmark01, 3Dmark03, CPUburn, Prime95, and several CPU and subsystem stress tests. It always remained stable and a good showing especially for a board with a very cheap price tag.

On Chip IDE Devices
FIC includes the the full range of support built into the VIA chipset for its included IDE devices. SATA support is present including support for SATA Raid. There are two (2) SATA headers located on the board just to the right of the VIA southbridge:

FIC also kindly included SATA/molex power connectors which will help all those consumers who do not have a PSU built within the last 6 months or without native SATA power connectors on their PSU.

On to The Benchmarks and Performance

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