by Anna Filatova
07/10/2002 | 02:28 PM
As we have already told you in our news (see this news story), the new FIC mainboard based on ATI IGP320 appeared not very successful, to put it mildly, having shown quite low performance and revealed a number of problems. All in all, this is typical of all new chipsets (remember NVIDIA nForce, which launching was postponed by over 6 months and the constantly improved and polished VIA chipsets with the "A" index).
One of the problems about the test samples of the FIC AT31 appeared unstable work with AMD Athlon processors. Although it appeared to get along just excellently with their younger brothers, Duron CPUs. According to sources, FIA’s reaction to the problem followed very rapidly by adding one more capacitor to the processor power circuit, which has cured the problem once and for all.<%BANNER[article]%>
It looks as if the company decided to save some money on extra components, which led to this problem with the CPU power circuits, because Athlon processors consume much more power than Duron ones.
We sincerely hope that FIC will manage to solve all other problems easily as well. On the other hand, ATI also has something to work on: the drivers and BIOS need more polishing, I believe, so that the board could not only work properly but also perform adequately.