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Freeway Design FWD-CUPA Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Sunday, September 16, 2001

Introduction

It's motherboard review time here at Ninjalane, and once again we are graced with another fine product from Freeway, the FWD-CUPA. This board is based on the PM133 chipset from VIA and is further enhanced with many other features that make it a perfect motherboard for the multi-media user and professional.

Though the fun doesn't stop there because this motherboard has a twin. This other motherboard, the FWD-A7KA, is exactly the same though having one major difference, It supports the AMD Athlon processor. Look for more information about this motherboard in a seperate and much smaller review here.

As I mentioned earlier the FWD-CUPA is based on the VIA PM133 chipset, which supports Socket370 processors. For those that don't know these include the Intel Pentium III (excluding the Tualatin), Celeron, and Cyrix. The processor settings are controlled in two places. First is on the motherboard in the form of dipswitches, they control Front Side Bus, Vio voltage and the CPU bus multiplier. Additionally there is a processor type jumper that allows support for the different Cyrix style processors. The other location of course is in the bios. The default setting in both locations is "auto detect" though both can adjusted to the following speeds 66/75/100/105/110/124/133/140/150.

As you can probably guess that this board isn't very overclocker friendly. Though I suspect this is by design considering the multitude of additional features that this board supports and limitations of those components.