FIC has been a mainstay in the motherboard market for years. Maybe not as popular as Abit or Asus, but they have done well none the less. ATI has been a mainstay in the Video and Video Adjunct market for years, ATI and motherboards, until recently, were unheard of. Maybe ATI got tired of hearing how well nVidia is doing in the chipset arena and decided to play along, or maybe they felt they bring something to the table that was missing, most notably, integrated Video that didn't suck.

In my grubby little hands today I am looking over an ATI RS350 chipset based FIC motherboard, the . This is a MicroATX motherboard that includes onboard Audio, USB, LAN, SATA and of course, Video. Let's take a look at the P4M's specifications.

The FIC P4M-RS350

I received this board from FIC without the usual fanfare; there was no included Driver CD, extra games, manual or other software that would be included with your purchase. With this, I unfortunately can not tell you what is truly included in the standard purchased packaging.

As we've already mentioned, the board is based on the ATI RS350 chipset. It officially supports Intel's Socket-478 3.6GHz and lower (it should also support LGA775, but obviously not on this board), as well as up to 4GB of DDR400 ram. Dual Channel is supported (though only up to 1GB per channel) and the ram slots are colour coded to ease installation. The ATI RS350 is passively cooled by an aluminum heatsink. Given the board is targeted at OEMs and small PCs, cutting down on the noise was probably the deciding factor in going with a passive solution.

Up to four IDE devices are supported via two IDE channels which are located along the edge of the motherboard. Next to the IDE are the floppy and ATX power connections as well. The board also has two SATA connections which along with supporting single drives, they support RAID-0, and 1.

For expansion, there are three PCI slots and one AGP 8x slot. While the board has onboard graphics, those of you looking to get a little more VPU power can easily upgrade to a discreet AGP solution.

Removing the RS350 heatsink exposes the main chipset. The chipset supports Direct X 8.1 natively and has pixel shader 1.4 support, though ATI did optimize the chipset for DX9 as well.

Installation

I physically installed the motherboard without issue, as this is a MicroATX board. I installed the memory and external devices (KB, Mouse, HD and CD-ROM) then proceeded to install Windows XP-SP2. This is where I ran into issues. Windows XP installed fine, however, it did not recognize several of the integrated components on this board. The video was easily averted by simply installing the latest ATI software. I, however, needed to get to the FIC website and download specific drivers for the LAN, Audio and chipset accelerators. Once on the website I went searching for the updates, I am not new mind you to searching for updated drivers, it's typically a weekly thing for me. Even so, I was not able to locate any downloads for this motherboard, not even the current manual.

In my day job I work in customer service, and it is very important to me that a manufacturer has at minimum, a decent customer service group. I contacted FIC using their technical support email address as a normal user would, asking for assistance in finding drivers for my particular motherboard, as well as the manual. I also continued searching their website. After three days and no response, I contacted the channel that had gotten me the motherboard in the first place as to a location of the drivers. They replied with an "I will get that information to you as soon as possible". It has now been almost 45 days, and I have yet to hear from either. This and this alone, is enough for me personally not to purchase an FIC product.

Oh, and how, you may be asking, did I get the drivers etc to run the tests for this review? As I mentioned, ATI was easy enough for the integrated IGP9100, standard ATI drivers. The LAN and Audio I found the chips they used on the motherboard and downloaded generic drivers from the web. The chipset drivers, well, that is another story, lets just say that if you have an RS-350 chipset, it is new enough that the driver is generic to the point that I can install, say MSI's version of it, and it will work fine.

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.

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.

We'll be comparing the FIC P4M-RS350's 9100 IGP Pro's performance directly against a 9600 XT. While there will be no surprises in the performance deltas, we did want to choose what we felt was a realistic card people would choose to go with the motherboard given its price point (and not VPU power).

ATI 9100 Pro IGP Testing (Video)

Unreal Tournament 2004: (DirectX) dm-rankin

Unreal Tournament 2004: (DirectX) as-convoy

The ATI 9100 Pro IGP surprisingly displays UT2K4 well enough to be played, not a bad accomplishment for an integrated graphics card. You don't, however, want to stray beyond 800x600, as you drop into the 20's beyond that.

Not surprisingly, the ATI 9600xt outperforms (this should be a theme), I just wanted to show you to what level you could expect graphics support for your games.

Call of Duty: (OpenGL) Custom VL_brecourt

This is Viperlairs homemade demo so we could get a more realistic game play result. The results of which, well, lets say they were less than flattering to the 9100 Pro IGP (insert graph from FIC P4M.xls CoD Section).
The 9100 Pro IGP is, for the most part, unplayable. Even at 800x600 we only achieve 14.5 FPS, if you play CoD, be prepared to purchase an add on card if you get this motherboard.

Quake III: (OpenGL) four.dm_67

The 9100 Pro IGP plays Quake III well enough to be played at 1024x768 resolution. Even though CoD (where the 9100 Pro struggles) uses a modified Quake3 engine, it appears the 9100 Pro IGP has no issues in getting the framerates up to playability in the original.

Doom 3: (OpenGL) Demo 1

Ouch. There will be no Doom 3 for you if you stick with the onboard video.

Hard Drive performance

We are using HD Tach Version 2.61 for this testing. We will be comparing the ICH5-R solution used by Intel 865's to the IXP-300 employed by ATI. This should show us if SATA is SATA across different manufacturer motherboards as well as varying chipset solutions to SATA.

FIC	ABIT

The Abit AI7 has a much smoother transition line than the FIC P4M-RS350; you can see there is a great deal of variance on the FIC motherboard as compared to the Abit. This is a very interesting test in that this is the exact same hard drive in both tests, just 2 days apart.

Network Performance

Both motherboards employ the Realtek 81xx onboard LAN solution; let's see how the two fair using different NB/SB. We will be using DU Meter and a crossover cable between the two machines to test the throughput of several files varying in size between 300KB and 150MB. Total data transferred for this test is 3.29GB.

FIC Download	FIC Upload	ABIT Download	ABIT Upload

As you can see, the FIC maintains around 10.5Mb/Sec throughput on upload, that's nearly 84MB. Not bad use of a 100MB pipe. Download is slightly less at ~9.9Mb/Sec or nearly 78MB. Both upload and download used a maximum of 22% CPU utilization, primarily during the transfer the CPU was in the mid teens. Comparing to the AI7, we see similar download results and disparate upload. The P4M-RS350 outperforms here as the AI7 comes in at a mere ~7.88MB/Sec or nearly 63Mb, this is done however with drastically less CPU utilization. The AI7 maintained sub 17% during this test, with the primary CPU utilization hanging around the 7-9% range.

Audio Chipset Performance

We downloaded and installed Audio Winbench to test its CPU utilization. CPU utilization was fairly high throughout the DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization got as high as 32%, and averaged in the 14%-18% range, which is a lot higher than the <2% averages we have seen with the nForce2. It's not a system killer, but we are getting close, as this is a 2.4GHz machine.

Audio Winbench is a synthetic benchmark, so let's play UT2004 and see how the system is affected with sound on and off.

I built a batch file to run UT2004 with and without sound at its lowest possible settings for the map "br-colossus". This should give us a good indication of the CPU hit when running a more true to life game over a synthetic benchmark. Tests will be done with the same hardware configuration as the rest of the benchmarks, except we will be only displaying the Intel P4 2.4C numbers.

640x480

The CPU takes a 9.1% hit during this test when enabling onboard sound. Not a huge hit on the CPU whilst running a video game. Keep in mind, the settings used are not going to be ideal if eye candy is important to you. Now let's see what happens when we set it up as a typical gamer might use it.

1024x768

When it comes down to it, at high resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization should not be a factor.

In terms of sound quality, I inserted a few different DVD's and played back the good parts (Pirates of the Caribbean / The Matrix / Pearl Harbor) and tested the SPDIF out ( I happen to have a copper riser here) as well as the stock Headphone Jack. The reproduction with the SPDIF was of high caliber and gave my AR headphones good information to process. The stock Headphone jack was as expected, simple Left / Right sound with no spatial information, but up to par with others.

OverClocking

Nope, not in the BIOS for either the CPU or the Graphics. It's a MicroATX, what did you expect?

Final Words

FIC, along with ATI, has packaged a lot of punch in a small package. Although the graphics might not impress those of us with high end video cards, it is enough to get you playing a few games on the go. Performance does not compare with the Intel chipset brethren, but is not far enough behind that you could totally disregard it as a competitor.

The P4M-RS350 itself is a complete package that gives you the ability to upgrade the graphics when you have the money to do so. It carries competent performance and enough onboard solutions that voids the fact there is only 3 PCI slots available. The customer service however, makes me cringe with even the thought of it.

Pros:
Decent performance for an all in one (especially the graphics)
Expandable graphics with incorporated 8x AGP slot
SATA in a MicoATX

Cons:
CPU Utilization on Audio / NIC
Customer Service
Customer Service (Yes, we know we wrote that twice)

Bottom Line: The FIC P4M-RS350 is a fairly complete MicroATX solution, giving you plenty of memory space, CPU selection and the option to upgrade to a higher end Graphics card when needed. Lets just hope if you purchase this motherboard that you never have to contact FIC for assistance&

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

HOME