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Freeway Design FWD-A7KA Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Sunday, September 23, 2001
Conclusion
Conclusion
I have always been skeptical of motherboards with lots of onboard features. In many cases poor performance
and limited expandability plagues these offerings. That's not an issue with the FWD-A7KA, this board has been pre-tuned at the
factory to provide exceptional performance and stability straight out of the box. Plus with a few tweaks in the bios you can
unleash additional performance never thought possible from a VIA chipset.
Some of the things that make this board stand out from the crowd is by far the additional multi-media features like CardBus, digital 5.1 audio, onboard Ethernet and IEEE 1394, and for the avid hardware guy like myself Freeway has provided a full set of PCI slots with plenty of room to expand.
So what did I like about this board? Believe it or not I liked just about everything, the board is based around a stable SDRAM chipset that supports many of the latest standards like ATA100 and AGP 4x. There is also the addition of onboard Ethernet and High-Quality sound that are big pluses for the avid gamer. The last two additions to this motherboard I would have never expected to see on the PC desktop, those would be IEEE 1394 (Firewire), and PCIbus (Cardbus). This addition alone adds value and freedom to the end user that has a Macintosh and/or Laptop in their home or office.
Some things that would have made this offering from Freeway even better would have been the addition of an onboard RAID controller though when looking at this boards layout I'm not sure where they would have put it. Ultimately this is where the PCI expansion slots come into play. Simply drop a Promise FastTrack or Adaptec SCSI controller on there and away you go.
Once again I am very pleased with this Freeway product. This motherboard provides exceptional stability with a vast array of expandability options.
Some of the things that make this board stand out from the crowd is by far the additional multi-media features like CardBus, digital 5.1 audio, onboard Ethernet and IEEE 1394, and for the avid hardware guy like myself Freeway has provided a full set of PCI slots with plenty of room to expand.
So what did I like about this board? Believe it or not I liked just about everything, the board is based around a stable SDRAM chipset that supports many of the latest standards like ATA100 and AGP 4x. There is also the addition of onboard Ethernet and High-Quality sound that are big pluses for the avid gamer. The last two additions to this motherboard I would have never expected to see on the PC desktop, those would be IEEE 1394 (Firewire), and PCIbus (Cardbus). This addition alone adds value and freedom to the end user that has a Macintosh and/or Laptop in their home or office.
Some things that would have made this offering from Freeway even better would have been the addition of an onboard RAID controller though when looking at this boards layout I'm not sure where they would have put it. Ultimately this is where the PCI expansion slots come into play. Simply drop a Promise FastTrack or Adaptec SCSI controller on there and away you go.
Once again I am very pleased with this Freeway product. This motherboard provides exceptional stability with a vast array of expandability options.
I would like to thank the people of Freeway for providing this motherboard.
You can see all of Freeway's product offerings at the following websites
http://www.freeway.co.jp (Japanese)
http://www.freeway.co.tw (Chinese)
and the Retail shop "TwoTop"
http://www.twotop.co.jp (Japanese)
Yes I realize that these sites are not in English. If you have any questions feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help.
http://www.freeway.co.jp (Japanese)
http://www.freeway.co.tw (Chinese)
and the Retail shop "TwoTop"
http://www.twotop.co.jp (Japanese)
Yes I realize that these sites are not in English. If you have any questions feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help.
