Next Generation Motherboard Platforms - Part 1: The Athlon Craze

The SD11 was the highly anticipated Athlon motherboard simply because of one line placed on its specifications at FIC's site: Auto-detect or Selection Clock Ratio from BIOS / Auto-detect or Selection FSB frequencies from BIOS. What most people took this as meaning that the SD11 would be the ideal overclocker's board but, it turns out that the "feature" wasn't implemented in the BIOS at the time of production.

The SD11 features an AMI BIOS setup with a decent number of configuration options but, nothing too special However, with the latest BIOS upgrade the 120MHz and 133MHz FSB options become available in the setup utility.

The SD11's first "feature," as it has been proclaimed by many, is the larger size of the motherboard. The reasoning behind this isn't to offer more space to make installation easier but, instead, it is because the SD11 is more of a publicly released engineering sample than anything else. The SD11 was obviously never intended to be FIC's flagship Athlon platform so don't be too surprised if you see a very quick demise of the SD11 in the near future.

Looking at the ATX I/O ports (below) on the SD11 there is definitely something amiss. The absence of one 9-pin serial port and the misplacement of the USB ports not only make it impossible to find an ATX I/O shield for the board but also contribute to the "not fit for resale" theory.