As far as overclocking is concerned, the options offered by this mainboard are quite common for barebone systems. You can manually set the FSB frequency to any value from 100MHz to 166MHz. And that’s it. No voltages adjustment, no means to change the AGP/PCI frequencies. Well, maybe the overclocking-friendly barebone systems are still to come later...

The power supply unit of FIC IC-VG61 is not a standard thing. It is a small 220W PSU from the not very well-known Chinese Laconic Company. But the absence of great popularity didn’t tell on the PSU functioning quality: we didn’t discover any problems with the power supply unit during our tests. Moreover, we found this PSU somewhat better than the Achme’s solution, as it heated much less than the latter. Moreover, Laconic PSU is equipped with a switch at the back panel. However, Laconic PSU also appeared a bit larger than the solution from Achme and features fewer cables to connect the devices. There were no free cables left after we connected the HDD, the floppy drive and the CD-ROM. It means that you will not be able to use graphics cards requiring extra power or any other additional equipment without a power-bale splitter.

Although the insides of FIC IC-VG61 are cooled down in a pretty standard manner, this system still can boast some outstanding ideas, which are worth mentioning in our article. The SFF cooling solution from FIC looks as follows. The PSU is cooled with its own fan blowing the air outside the case, the chipset North Bridge is equipped with a passive heatsink, the CPU is equipped with its own classical cooler, and there is a special cross flow fan blowing the air outside the system case. There are two things we would like to draw your attention to here. First, take note that the CPU fan is nearly touching the HDD chassis. However, since it is sucking the air in, the air stream doesn’t heat up the hard disk drive. On the contrary it cools the HDD quite efficiently. As for the cross flow fan, this is a very rare solution for standard PC cases, however, solutions like that are often used in air conditioners. The major advantage of this cooler is its small size. It is only due t this smaller fan that FIC engineers managed to place a larger power supply unit into FIC IC-VG61 case. So, there are three fans in FIC IC-VG61 altogether. This is less than by Soltek EQ2000M, but more than by Shuttle SB51G.

Inside FIC IC-VG61 everything looks very similar to what we have already seen by Soltek and Shuttle. The case allows using large graphics cards, however, you will not be able to install full-size PCI cards into the available slot. Since the AGP 4x slot is located very closely to the case side, you will not be able to use VGA cards with massive cooling onboard. As for the cables placement inside the FIC IC-VG61 case, we have to admit that FIC engineers deserve all the laurels: the cables are placed in the most optimal ways, the cables are of the minimal length, they never disturb the airflow and never hinder easy system assembly. We would like to say that in terms of internal component structure, we liked FIC Ice Cube system most of all.