Inside the BIOS

Straying away from the pack, FIC decided to use a less conventional AMI BIOS, as opposed to the Award BIOS. I have always used Award's BIOSs before, and there wasn't much of anything that really caught my eye. Most everything was just basic commands and settings that usually come standard. I would recommend an AMI BIOS to the beginner though. AMI's online help is very good, and explains many of its features very decisively.

Unlike earlier revisions of this board, the front-side bus settings of 120MHz and 133MHz were not available in this revision. This is not really that big of a deal as Overclocking with a gold-finger type of card will yield much better results. Another downside was that I was unable to find any form of hardware based CPU/Chipset temperature monitoring.

Final Verdict

Overall the FIC SD11 (rev 1.8) is an improvement over the previous revisions of the board, but still has a few notable problems. Manly, the power supply issues, along with the unusually large size of this board will give some users problems. On the other hand, at the time of this writing I could find a SD11 on Pricewatch for as little as $94, much cheaper than they were when they were first released. With the newer VIA KX133 Athlon boards already available, this board may not be one worth buying, though at about $50 less than most it is still a viable option.

by Ryan Wissman

Price - 9.2 Performance - 6.5 Overall - 7.0/10

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