Press release FIC AZ11E

FIC release the AZ11E, the latest addition to a family of high performance Athlon motherboards

Taipei, November 14, 2000- FIC today announced the release of the 1stMainboard AZ11E Socket A motherboard, the much-anticipated successor to the hugely popular 1stMainboard AZ11. Like its predecessor, the AZ11E supports the advanced AMD Athlon™ and Duron™ processors, and is based around the advanced architecture of the VIA KT133 chipset. This latest addition to the impressive 1stMainboard family offers processor speeds of up to 1.2 GHz and beyond for future processors, and with 200 MHz System Bus, PC-133 SDRAM and AGP 4X, new performance standards are set for x86 processors.

The ATX sized AZ11E also supports the high value Duron™ processor, at speeds of up to 800 MHz and beyond. The Duron™ processor is the ideal solution for value conscious business and home-users that don’t wish to compromise on performance. End-users who demand flexibility and the ability to maximize their system's performance are well served by the adjustable voltage and multiplier settings via four dipswitches. The voltage can be set at one of sixteen settings between 1.475 V and 1.850 V, at 0.025 V steps, while the ratio offers sixteen different settings, between 5x and 12.5x at increments of 0.5x.

Another notable feature of the AZ11E is Audio Alert II™, which is part of FIC’s exclusive NOVUS™ suite of features that brings ease of use and functionality to the end-user. Audio Alert II is an industry first multi lingual voice warning technology, which helps ensure the safety of the system, and also allows users to record a personal greeting on an IC chip.

Onboard Audio is also provided, which can be disabled using the BIOS, and 3 DIMM allow the option of 1.5GB of PC-133 SDRAM. The AZ11E has 1 AGP slot, 1 Communications and Network Riser (CNR) slot, 5 PCI slots, and can support a maximum of 4 USB connections. Furthermore, Ultra DMA 100 (mode 5) ensures the very fastest data transfer speeds are achieved.

FIC were one of the industry's frontrunners in developing solutions for the Athlon™ processor, and have already enjoyed immense success with Slot A and Socket A solutions. The SD11, incidentally, was the world's first motherboard to be officially recognized by AMD for supporting processor speeds of 1GHz, while the AZ11 was awarded the prestigious Best of Computex award by Nikkei Byte of Japan at this year's Computex Taipei show.