BIOS

FIC incorporated the Phoenix Award BIOS for the P4M-RS350. It is a basic layout with some user changeable options, but for the most part, it's plug and play with minimal tweaking ability.

You'll have to excuse the lack of BIOS screenshots but considering the lack of tweaking options, there is not a whole lot to show to our readers.

Testing

So yes Scarlet, I am going to continue to review the board to see of there are any redeeming factors given our rather poor experience with customer support. The test system is laid out as follows:

FIC P4M-RS350 Motherboard (with integrated IGP-9100 Video)
Intel P4 2.4C
Cooler Master Aero Fan / Cool Jag Skivving HS
1GB OCZ PC-3700 DDR
Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA Drive
Windows XP-SP2
ATI Catalyst 4.11

The comparison system will be:

ABIT AI7 (Springdale)
1GB OCZ PC-3700 DDR
ATI 9600xt 128MB
Stock Cooling
Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA Drive
Windows XP-SP2
ATI Catalyst 4.11

Due to the nature of this board, I am going to have to do a combo motherboard / graphics review. Not as detailed mind you, as I am sure you are all aware, the IGP-9100 is by no means an X800xt or even a 9600xt graphics card. Let's start with the Motherboard side of things and follow with the graphics capabilities.

Main Board Testing:

For the main board testing I will be using the following programs;
SiSoft Sandra 2004
PiFast 4.3
TMPGEnc
DU Meter
HD Tach
Audio Winbench

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and Memory Speeds at stock 2.4GHz.

CPU

MMX

Memory

When compared to a Springdale chipset, you can see the ATI RS350 falls short, and not just slightly. The CPU tests the FIC tries to hang in there, once we reach the Memory tests, there is more than just a little shortcoming.

PiFast 4.3

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of pi, chudnovsky method, 1024 k FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Once again, a comparison to the Springdale chipset is somewhat embarrassing for the RS350. The RS350 almost takes 50% longer with the same CPU/RAM as the AI7.

TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding

We will encode a 150mb AVI file to MPEG2 (a somewhat realistic chore as DVD's are MPEG-2). For the AVI to MPEG-2 conversion I used a bitrate of 5000k/sec, as this is around the midrange of a typical DVD. I used a frame size of 720x480 (DVD Standard) and 16:9 NTSC. Note that lower scores are better.

The RS350 stands nicely in this test, the fact that this is very hard on a system and requires not only good CPU/memory utilization, it also requires good communication with the I/O, in this case, the Hard Drive. I was truly expecting this to be not only another blowout for the AI7; I was not expecting this to be even a close test. This bodes well for the ATI chipset.

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