Overclocking the FC-PGA Coppermine: Part 2

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Of these three motherboards, the KA-11 gave us the most problems.  The board itself seems to be a quickly constructed solution where the 694X North Bridge replaced the 693A used in one of their older designs, specifically the KA-6110.  While this could be the explanation of the problems we encountered, they may be attributed to other unknown factors.  Regardless, the conclusion remains that the KA-11 performed very poorly in the stability department.

The KA-11 would randomly lock up during normal operation, sometimes even completely shutting down the system while not even undertaking any heavy tasks.  It’s obvious that the KA-11 has some issues, but, hopefully, they are not problems that FIC can’t solve.  They shouldn’t be, because two other manufacturers have already proven to us that they are capable of producing 133A boards without these issues. 

While the board’s Award BIOS setup doesn’t have the same CPU IOQ Size setting as the Trinity 400, it is noticeably faster than the AOpen, but still slower than the Tyan with CPU IOQ Size set to 4.  Once again, it seems like there is quite a bit of room for improvement in performance through BIOS enhancements/tweaks and, as more of these boards are released, expect performance to approach a more uniform level among competitors.  Until then, it seems like Tyan is on top. 

One unique feature of the KA-11 is the 6-pin power connector it features in addition to the 20-pin ATX PSU connector.  The 6-pin connector can be used for fan speed control of the power supply’s fan.  While this may not seem like the most useful feature, it is unique nonetheless.  The KA-11 was also the only board of the three to feature four DIMM slots.