Finally found a board I've been hunting for some time: the FIC PA-2007.
I've had a lot of luck with the FIC VA-502 I picked up recently and figured it's time to try out its bigger sibling. The VA-502 a really fast board for what it is, and it does indeed excel with Cyrix 6x86s. This is pretty impressive, considering that the VIA VPX chipset isn't exactly known as a top performer. RedHill suggested that the VA-502 outperformed better boards with the 6x86MX-200, which I can't exactly validate completely, but I can say that it does perform quite well with such CPUs. I do intend to test that more extensively. I'd be curious to see how the SiS5571 compares. Really, what I like about the VA-502 most has to be its stability at 75MHz. That board came with a 6x86-200 (the classic variant, but an IBM-labelled one) and runs brilliantly with that CPU.
By contrast, the PA-2007 has the VP2 chipset, which seems to really have only been used on a handful of boards. The VP2 is more of a TX chipset competitor, perhaps even on the level of the Aladdin IV. It comes with 1MB of L2 cache and can cache a complete 512MB of RAM--absurd for the time, and only matched by an HX board with a second TAG or a comparatively ancient NX board. Apparently, AMD's 640 chipset is a licensed VIA VP2. This board should perform excellent with the K6-233 or 6x86. I'm truly curious if this board really is the "fastest board from 1997" and deserves to be known as a speed demon, or whether it's all just marketing hooplah.
Later BIOSes support the K6-2 and, while the PA-2007 only officially supports 2.8V at its lowest, the "lesser" VA-502 can do 2.5V with some undocumented settings (confirmed via a multimeter). I suspect the same holds true here.
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