VIA K8T800 Based Mainboard from FIC Transpired

by Anton Shilov
09/13/2003 | 12:32 AM

An Asian web-site has published a picture and feature-set of VIA K8T800-based mainboard from FIC. The mainboard is made using green PCB and is not really advanced in terms of additional capabilities – simply the K8-800T is just what you need for building a mainstream personal computer based on a Socket 754 CPU.

Since FIC and EPoX traditionally share some R&D expenses and maybe even produce mainboards for each other (see this news-story), as we revealed earlier this year, such device may also be found in EPoX’s Fall 2003 lineup, I believe.

The specs of the FIC K8-800T are as follows:

• Supports Socket 754 AMD Athlon 64 processors;
• VIA K8T800 + VIA VT8237 core-logic;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM;
• 5 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated ATA-33/66/100/133 controller;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID support;
• 10/100Mb/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek;
• 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• 2 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• Integrated AC`97 6-channel audio solution with S/PDIF connector;
• Some additional functions and technologies from FIC or EPoX, possibly including overclocking options;
• ATX Form-factor.

As we may conclude from this picture by absence of some capacitors and CPU cooler retention mechanism, the mainboard is not finalized, but is almost ready to hit the mass production. This means that the product will probably be formally announced sometime by Computex Taipei 2003 and will be available by mid-October in the worst case. Pricing of FIC K8-800T will definitely be very user-friendly as the device itself is not too advanced one.