Correction on my previous comments on the FIC 503A. It doesn't use the MVP4 chipset (Red Hill is wrong there) but uses the normal MVP3 northbridge with the VT82C686A 'super southbridge' the MVP4 also used. (hence the onboard sound capability -and likely where Red Hill's confusion stemmed from, particularly since they never actually used the board)

I'm sure I'd already seen this detail in the manual, but had forgotten until looking at it again recently.

Another interesting thing I missed was the soutbridge's sound is listed as not only AC97 (and AMR) compliant, but Sound Blaster compatible, so DOS sound compatibility is probably better than most onboard sound implementations. (and would explain why I remember windows games using FM synthesis general midi rather than the typical Microsoft software midi driver using the Roland sample set)

The MVP4 northbridge has the Trident Blade3D GPU embedded in it, and many MVP4 boards use heatsinks on the northbridge as well. (the Blade 3D is also faster and nicer looking for most things than the Rage Pro in our 503A system, so there'd have been no sense in using that card with an MVP4 board -particularly as most MVP4 boards have 8 MB of dedicated texture/framebuffer memory, like the Rage Pro uses, and neither supports proper AGP texture mapping -just fast AGP 2x DMA copy/swap functionality, and both support DVD acceleration)