Mainboard maker FIC has announced availability of its VIA K8T800-based mainboards for AMD Socket 754 Athlon 64 microprocessors. In order to address broader market segments, the company presents an ATX and two micro-ATX platforms. In general, the products for processors at $400-$500 price-point seem to be targeted on the lower-end of the market, considering their very conservative specifications.

The company offers only VIA-powered devices, there are no AMD, NVIDIA or ALi mainboards in its line-up. It is not a surprise – NVIDIA and AMD target their products on performance and features minded users, who typically do not care about pricing, while ALi has not delivered any actual products into the market so far.

FIC’s K8-800T mainboard in ATX form-factor is based on the VIA K8T800 chipset and has to offer pretty moderate set of capabilities, such as AGP 8x, 5 PCI slots, 6 channel audio, USB 2.0 and Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133. The product does not support Serial ATA-150 or Ethernet controllers, as we can learn from FIC’s press-release.

Micro-ATX mainboards – FIC K8M-800T and FIC K8M-800M – intended for SIs and OEMs pack the same features as the FIC K8-800T with the exception that the K8M-800M is based on VIA K8M800 core-logic with integrated low-performance graphics core and providing 2 FireWire ports.

To sum up, with the new AMD64 line-up FIC probably wanted to address the market of aggressively priced mainboards and personal computers, where “64-bit processing” is needed for pure marketing reasons. We have seen some high-performance Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading technology in very basic systems that would never take advantage of such CPU. Such PCs are popular in some countries, we may say; therefore, there is some market space for FIC’s new Socket 754 products.