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"Utilizing a VIA chipset as opposed to a more traditional Intel based chipset the BIOS will come at a little bit of a surprise..."





While fiddling through the BIOS I noticed there was no option for setting the FSB/AGP clock ratio. Here was my problem. The only conceivable way around this (unless FIC releases a new bios with FSB/AGP clock ratio editing) is to use a slocket, and plug in either a Celeron or flip-chip PIII. By doing this you could make the Mainboard think that the CPU's FSB speed was supposed to be something it wasn't, therefore by-passing the need to manually set the FSB/AGP clock ratio.

The BIOS

Utilizing a VIA chipset as opposed to a more traditional Intel based chipset the BIOS will come at a little bit of a surprise, but still offers the basically same ease of use we have come accustomed to. Among some of the features is the ability to enable or disable AGP 4x, and AGP fast writes within the BIOS. These options might sound like they would never be used, but among some known problems with the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipsets is its tendency to lock up when fed one of the newer ATI Rage Fury MAXX cards, the remedy, disable AGP 4x and it will work fine.

Another noticeable disadvantage is the mainboards inability to change the FSB/AGP clock ratio. As described previously this causes some major problems when attempting to overclock your CPU. Also, there is no option to disable the onboard creative sound. The only way to do this is to go through windows' device manager and manually disable it.

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