The company First International Computer (FIC) is a new participant of the Retail motherboards market, though they have been known as the OEM producer for a long time. Recently, this company announced about the release of a new FIC mainboard for AMD processors.
The motherboard FIC K8M-800M is built on the chipset K8M800. The mainboard has two sockets 940 for the processors of the Athlon FX line. This line of processors includes only one model FX51 for the moment. Therefore, this platform is supposed to be very popular in the nearest future. The FIC K8M-800M supports the high speed interface FireWire (IEEE1394).
There are some models of the motherboards, which are similar to the FIC K8M-800M by their characteristics. For instance, the P4M-865GV is close to the FIC K8M-800M, though it is developed for Intel Pentium4 processors. This model is based on the system logic set from Intel 865GV. This chipset has an integrated graphical controller and it does not have an opportunity to work with additional video cards. This model should be used for non expensive office computers.
The motherboard FIC P4M-865GV has the Socket 478 and it works with the processors Intel Pentium 4. The bus clock for supported processors is 400/533/800 MHz. The motherboard supports up to 2 GB of the dual channel memory DDR400.
The sound system of the mainboard is implemented with a six channel audio codec. This sound controller is built on the AC'97 architecture. There is the controller Ultra DMA ATA 66/100 for the motherboard. This controller provides an opportunity to connect hard disks and to achieve a high speed of the data transfer between the disk and system kernel.
Peripheral devices should be connected to the system bus via PCI slots. There are three usual PCI slots for this motherboard.
The FIC motherboard has some types of integrated input and output ports. The system supports up to eight USB 2.0 ports. There are two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, which provide an extra high speed for the data transfer. There are two serial ports and one parallel port LPT. The system has sockets PS/2 for a mouse and keyboard.
There are fifteen condensers with the capacity 2200 mkF and twenty small condensers with the capacity 1000 mkF. These condensers can be useful for the system acceleration. Actually, the ability for overclocking is a distinguishing feature of FIC motherboards. The company installs DIP switchers for their products. These switchers can be used for changing the voltage of processor and multiplication coefficient for the clock rate.
The processor voltage can be set in the range from 1.475 up to 1.85 V. In the range from 1.7 up to 1.85 V the variation step is 0.025 V. These opportunities can satisfy even the most demanding overclocker and provide conditions for the flexible system adjustment.
The motherboard FIC P4M-865GV is implemented in the micro-ATX form-factor. That is the reason why the system can be mounted in small chassis. This is a good solution for computers, which should take as less space as it is possible.