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Freeway Design FWD-A7KA Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Sunday, September 23, 2001

Additional Features

Freeway included some additions with this board, One of which is an onboard RealTek Ethernet controller. This controller operates in 10Base-T and 100Base-Tx mode and supports Full-Duplex at any speed, of course this is important for getting the fastest network speed possible. If you would like to read more about this chip full specs can be found on their website

Another chip can be seen in this photo and that is the C-Media 6 Channel audio processor that gives this board real 5.1 Digital Surround Sound. Used in conjunction with the included media cards you get a completely digital sound system. You can find a complete listing of features for this chip on their website

The last photo shows the TI PCI4410A, Integrated PC Card processor chip. This chip gives us two things. First of which is IEEE-1394 (Firewire) and the second is a removable extension to the PCI bus, otherwise known as CardBus. Of course there is one stipulation to using the Cardbus, the cable distance between the external connector card and the motherboard can only be 20cm. The supplied cable is well over twice that in length so a little modification will be needed to make it work. More info about this chip can be found on the TI website