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BIOS and overclocking features

As with the MSI K7N2, the AU11 has some very nice BIOS features for overclockers, however FIC overshoots past many of MSI's initial mistakes and has a much more robust set of Vcore settings.

As you can see from the above table, FIC's BIOS features a much broader range of CPU Vcore settings. We're particularly impressed with the fact that the BIOS allows up to 2.2000V in 0.025V increments - many boards, if they even allow you to go above 1.8 or 2.0V, start to increment in 0.050V once they go into the 2.00V range. FIC also includes more aggressive (if esoteric) DIMM voltage settings, though most manufacturers (Corsair and OCZ included) do NOT recommend using more than 2.8V with their products. One factor that's strange in this board is the weird CPU clock multiplier settings. We would have just preferred to see 0.5X increments all the way up to 17X, instead of the strange supported multiplier patterns.

Test System Setup

Our test systems for this review were setup as below:

AMD XP2100+ (T-bred A)
AMD XP2700+ (T-bred B)
Thermaltake Volcano 9 "CoolMod"
512MB Corsair XMS3200 Memory/512MB OCZ PC3200 Memory
2x256MB Corsair TWINX3200LL DualChannel Memory
2x256MB OCZ PC3200EL Dual Channel Memory
Seagate 120GB ATA133 Barracuda ST3100
WinXP with SP1

In single channel mode, memory was set to 2-2-2 timings. For Dual Channel we set to the optimal settings for the modules, which is 2-2-5-2T for the Corsair TWINX3200LL set.