Reply 220 of 240, by analog_programmer
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Horun wrote on 2025-04-21, 01:51:Because FIC made very good motherboards, generally very stable, and back then (early -mid 1990's) they would respond to support emails.
I'll keep my right to (partially) disagree with your statement, just like I (fully) disagree with the popular statement that all of the PC Chips (ECS) products are total cr*p 😉 You know that technical support is much more than just answering to emails and telephone calls. And this very badly implemented BIOS update from 1997 shows only a small part of it - unfortunately a bad one. FIC's technical support may have been good in the early '90s, but that doesn't mean it was still that good from the mid '90s 'til they stopped making computer motherboards by the end of '2000s. So all these general conclusions which brand is good and which is bad are mostly non-sense.
As I already wrote, I didn't like this particular board at fist sight and my disliking was justified by some facts:
1. There's no built-in VRM for 3.3 V CPU support.
2. The user manual doesn't contain any description for the jumper settings related to AMD 486 CPUs. Does this fall under the tech support fault things? I think so.
3. The coin cell battery is directly soldered to the board and it's of far less used BR(CR)1225 model. Well, at least it's a coin cell lithium battery instead one of those disasterous leaking rechargeable Ni-Cd batteries 😀 So, this board definitely needs a CR1225 battery socket to be installed, as the original battery was depleted a long time ago.
4. This board supports 64 MB of SIMM FP-RAM modules (4 x 16 MB - I wish you a success in finding four 16 MB SIMM RAM modules in the mid 90's, not to mention the price) and only 32 MB of DIMM FP-RAM modules (2 x 16 MB). This is just a ridiculous distribution by types and volumes of supported memory modules. Well, I'm not like that one world-wide famous "philanthropist" to say "32 MB RAM in DIMM modules ought to be enough for anybody" 🤣
5. OTP-ROM chip is used instead of EEPROM or at least UV-erasable EPROM - just like in all the other cheap s.3 boards. If you want to update the BIOS to latest proper version 3.07, you need to buy ind install a new compatible (E)EPROM chip.
6. There's a PAL (or GAL) chip, which can not be read by my XGecu T48. Probably the chip is factory locked.
7. And now "the icing on the cake": this buggy 1997 BIOS "update"... just WOW!
Compared to my s.3 PC Chips M912 ver. 1.4 mobo (an early revision with real cache chips out of the factory) this FIC 486-GVT-2 is... let's say - useless to me.
The only thing that I like in this board is its build quality.
But all this is for another topic, so let's focus on BIOS modifications here.
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