The FIC PA-2013 is a very
nice ATX socket 7 motherboard, typical of the FIC family.
Feature-wise, it is basically an ATX counterpart to the VA-503+.

Let’s talk about layout. I
believe layout to be one of the most important aspects of a good
board. A bad layout and feature list make the board tough to work
with, regardless of how well it performs.

Being of the ATX form
factor, the PA-2013 is much easier to use than the AT form VA-503+.
One of the most nagging things about the VA-503+ was the hard to
reach and complicated jumper setup. In the PA-2013, FIC managed to
make the jumpers easier to adjust by putting them in much more
reachable locations. It isn’t perfect, though. The frequency jumpers
are located up in the corner of the board, right next to the CPU.
And, when the board is installed, all of the ribbon cables make it
difficult to reach this particular jumper block. Jumper setup is
definitely less complicated than the VA-503+. FIC actually managed
to create a manual with no addendums. The novice user, with a little
thought, should be able to set up this board without too much
trouble. The manual even includes a nice table of CPU and their
respective settings.

The case connectors are
mounted sideways on the board, making hooking up the board that much
easier. The board comes with a standard AWARD BIOS, including USB
support.

A couple other features of
the board are nice. The board comes equipped with thernal detection
hardware for the CPU. It also comes with remote wake-up support.
Trend Chip-Away Virus protection come hard coded into the BIOS,
making sure you can rid the system of boot-sector virii before the
OS is loaded.

Performance is fine. The
board is very stable, as long as you have good memory in it. It ran
stably at high bus speeds, including the undocumented 112 and 124
MHz speeds. I did run into a problem with Winstone 98, but this is
not something I’m blaming on the board, but on the software. Unreal
ran quite well on the board on both the Cyrix and AMD CPU’s,
although it was slower on the Cyrix.

Pros:

Stable
Compatible w/ just about everything
Well laid out
Nice performance

Cons:

Only 2 ISA slots, and 4 PCI’s
(which is actually fine for most, but some need more)
No EDO RAM slots

So, obviously there are more
pros than cons with this board. The PA-2013 is a great all-around
ATX Super 7 motherboard. No major complaints, nice performance, and
stable.

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