Closer Look: FIC A92

The bright-red PCB featured very simple design. The left part of the card looks a little empty, because RV250/RV280 chips require neither separate TV-Out controllers, nor additional RAMDACs for multi-display support implementation.

The graphics card cooling is designed in the same way as that of Gigabyte GV-R9200 (see our review here): it is the same passive heatsink, but colored shining gold. We would like to point out that FIC used thermal interface with much better heat conductivity than that used by Gigabyte Technology, because the bottom of the FIC A92 graphics card was always less warm that the bottom of the Gigabyte MAYA II GV-R9200 (see our Gigabyte MAYA II GV-R9200 Review). When we removed the original thermal interface from Gigabyte’s graphics card and applied regular thermal paste, the card heated up much less. The advantages of FIC’s passive cooling solution were indisputable.

We would like to remind you that in all RADEON 9200 based graphics cards the core works at 250MHz, and DDR SDRAM at 400MHz. The PSB carries 64MB of memory by Mosel Vitelic, marked as V58C365164SBT4, although in the Web we saw some pictures of FIC A92 graphics card with Hynix memory chips featuring 5ns access time (400MHz DDR). The reverse side of the PCB has nothing special about it.

As for overclocking, it is blocked on FIC A92 like on many other RADEON 9200 based graphics solutions without “PRO” in the name. So, you can be sure that your graphics card will not die from overheating.

Testbed and Methods

We decided to test FIC A92 together with the ATI RADEON 9000 PRO and Gigabyte GV-R9200. This time, we will not include the results for NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440, because it doesn’t comply with the today’s standards and doesn’t support pixel shaders. Also, we replaced the Athlon XP/VIA KT333 based platform with Intel Pentium 4 platform. Here is the testbed configuration:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.4C, 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, HyperThreading;
• ABIT IC7 mainboard (i875P);
• 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM from Corasir (XMS3200);
• Seagate HDD 7200.7, 8MB cache, Serial ATA/150;
• Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024 sound card;
• Microsoft Windows XP SP1;
• ATI CATALYST 3.4 drivers.

The list of applications used for performance analysis remained the same. Here it is for your reference:

• Futuremark 3DMark 2001SE Build 330
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225, Antalus Flyby
• Quake3: Arena v1.32, Demo four
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein v1.4, Demo checkpoint
• Serious Sam: Second Encounter v1.07, The Grand Catherdral
• Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast  v1.04, Massasi Temple – Lightsaber Test
• Splinter Cell v1.2b, 1_1_1Tbilisi Demo

Every gaming benchmark was run with the highest graphics quality settings. We set 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions in the “raw speed” mode and 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions in the 2x FSAA + 16x Anisotropic Filtering. We raised the anisotropy level because enabling this mode on R200/RV250/RV280 solutions doesn’t tell too much on their performance, while the image quality gets noticeably better. Moreover, we tried to select more or less optimal settings, so that we could see the advantages of 128MB onboard graphics memory.