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  • Freeway Design FWD-P3C4XD Motherboard Review
  • Freeway Design FWD-P3C4XD Motherboard Review

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    Features/Specifications

    Board Features/specs page 2
    Setting up the system was pretty easy, with everything documented in the manual. When setting up processors you can allow the bios to choose the processor for you or you can define the processor based on three settings Host Clock speed, CPU multiplier, and CPU voltage. All of these can be auto set by the bios and work quite well. If you choose to set the FSB manually you will also need to set the multiplier for that processor. The FSB speeds are listed on the spec sheet with a maximum unsupported speed of 166MHz. During my testing I decided to allow the bios to decide on the proper CPU voltage and much to my surprise everything worked just fine.

    Memory settings can be very simple or quite specific, the settings are either Auto or you can define them based on the following criteria.

    SDRAM CAS Latency
    SDRAM RAS Precharge Time
    SDRAM RAS Pulse width
    SDRAM RAS to CAS Delay

    From what I can tell these settings are global for all of the memory banks.
    Along with these settings you can adjust the DRAM clock by 33 MHz +/- independent of the timing controls.

    This motherboard also came with a variety of cables including a few signature pieces. In these pictures you will set the drive cables, one 80pin ATA66, one 40pin IDE and one floppy. The 40pin and floppy drive connectors are factory stranded and have a thicker insulation on them. On set intervals they do form a ribbon cable though simply pulling the wires apart at those intervals yields a cable ready for "rounding". Even without pulling the wires apart the stranding of the ribbon allows more flexibility in the cable and ease of placement.