After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.

Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com

Freeway Design FWD-CUPA Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Sunday, September 16, 2001

More Features - Cardbus

PCI/Cardbus

I have been in contact with Freeway throughout the development of the FWD-CUPA and when I first heard that this motherboard was going to support CardBus I became very curious about it. Here is a quote from the user manual about the PCIbus feature.
"The PCI4410A device is a dual-funtion PCI device that provides bridging between the PCI bus and PC Cards, and supports either 16-bit or CardBus PC Cards in the socket, Powered at 5v or 3.3v, as required. All card signals are buffered internally to allow hot insertion and removal without external buffering"

So in effect you get a hot-swappable extension to the PCI bus, similar to a laptop. 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.

This chip also provides the IEEE-1394a-2000 (Firewire) support as yet another feature of the FWD-CUPA. More info about this chip can be found on the TI website