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Flexus'
Freetech Jupiter P6F99
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A
SIS Chip set Slot 1 Motherboard that sings sweetly!
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a lot of folks have heard of Flexus Computer Technology nor their
Freetech brand name motherboards, but we at Hot Hardware are going
to help change that! Incorporated in 1990, Flexus has a mission to
design quality motherboards and peripherals with a difference. Let's
see if they have succeeded with respect to the Jupiter P6F99! |
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around the SIS5600/5595 AGP chip set, this board has some unique
features including on board Creative Labs Audio! The board has a
4/3/1 configuration, as you can see, and that leaves you plenty of
option slots since you won't need a sound card in one of them!
Here's the rest of the story... |
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CPU:
Intel Pentium III, Intel Pentium II 233, 266, 300, 333MHz CPU, FSB
66MHz on Slot 1 Connector
Intel Celeron 266, 300, 300A, 333MHz CPU, FSB 66MHz on Slot 1
Connector
Intel Pentium II Deshutes 350, 400, 450 and 500Mhz CPU, FSB 100MHz
on Slot 1 Connector
System
Chipset:
SiS 5600/5595 AGP Chip set
ITE 8661F I/O chip
Optional Creative Lab ES1373 Audio Chip
Main Memory :
Three 168-Pin DIMM Sockets, supports 4MB to 768MB Memory
Supports SDRAM and EDO memory
Supports SDRAM ECC (Error Checking and Correction) Memory
Supports Symmetric and Asymmetric DRAM
Enhanced
I/O :
Two EIDE ports support up to Ultra DMA/33 and Bus Master DMA mode 2
and PIO mode 4, One Floppy port maximum transfer rate up to
1M-bit/sec
Two 16550 Compatible High Speed Serial Ports
One STD/ECP/EPP Bi-directional parallel port
Standard PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse Connector
Standard Dual USB Connectors
One IrDACompatible Infrared port
Expansion
Slots :
One 32-Bits AGP Slot,
Four 32-Bit PCI slots
Three 16-Bit ISA slots (one PCI/ISA shared slot)
Power
Management :
Compliant with EPA, APM 1. 2 and ACPI 1.0
External Modem Ring On
Watchdog Timer wake up
Soft - off power control
Sleeping state LED indicator
Fan off in sleeping state
Wake-on-LAN (WOL)
Keyboard Password Power-On
Optional
SiS System Hardware Monitor:
Monitors Temperature
Monitors Voltages
Monitors Fan Speed
Optional
Creative Lab ES1373 Audio Chip:
Support Aureal A3D API for 3D positional Audio
64 Voice WaveTable synthesizer
interface to PCI bus and AC97 codec
Compliance with Microsoft PC97/PC98
System
BIOS :
Support CDROM, LS-120 and ZIP drive multi-boot function
Years 2000 Compliance
AWARD Pentium II AGP/PCI BIOS
2M-Bit Flash EEPROM
Support Power Management, Plug and Play, DMI and Enhanced IDE
Devices
Supports PCI - to - PCI Bridge
Cable
Set :
One 40 - Pin IDE Ribbon Cable with Clip
One 34 - Pin Floppy Ribbon Cable with Clip
Board
Size :
ATX Form Factor, 12" x 7.5" ( 30. 5 cm x 19cm )
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board came configured with all those extra options for Sound, Temp.
Monitoring etc... You may have noticed the Sound Chip set supports
Aureal's A3D API, we put that to the test! More on that later. The
dreaded ATX power connector did show up behind the CPU Slot again.
This is all too common among newer Slot 1 boards. Other than that,
as you can see, this is a no compromises type of set up! The
features are there as well as the ability to set bus speeds at from
60 to 66, 75, 83, 95, 100, 112, 124, and 133 Mhz. The Front Side Bus
speed has to be set by jumpers but the clock multiplier is set in
the BIOS up to 6.5X. I think this was a little backwards. It would
be nice to set those FSB speeds in the BIOS and leave the multiplier
on a jumper or auto configured. Never the less, this didn't stop us
from cranking this board up to 500 Mhz. on our rocket P2-333 ! How
did the P6F99 hold up under the pressure? Let's look! |
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Our
Test System
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium 2 -333 Overclocked to 500,
Freetech P6F99 Slot 1 Motherboard, 64MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, Maxtor
4320 17 Gig HD, Gigabyte GA-630 Voodoo Banshee AGP Video Card, on
board Creative LabsES1373 Audio, Memorex 48X CDROM, Win98
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Overclocking
This board was
VERY stable at default voltage when overclocking our P2-333 SL2TV
step code chip to 500 Mhz. This is a processor that needs a voltage
boost depending on the motherboard used to overclock. Not so with
the P6F99! There are no options for CPU voltage adjustment on this
board, but we didn't need it. The board ran all our tests, without
crashing even once, at default CPU voltage. In a word, robust!
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Benchmarks
WinTune
98
Offline
Test Results
| CPU |
(1)
Intel Pentium II with MMX@500 MHz |
| Video
Board |
Gigabyte
Voodoo Banshee AGP w/ 16MB |
| Video
Mode |
1024x768@16bits/pixel |
| RAM |
64
MB |
| OS |
Windows
98 4.10.1998 |
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Area
Tested
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Value
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| CPU
Integer |
1454.182
MIPS |
| CPU
Floating Point |
583.9475
MFLOPS |
| Video(2D) |
87.63177
MPixels/s |
| Direct3D |
204.0323
MPixels/s |
| OpenGL |
7.958601
MPixels/s |
| Memory |
821.739
MB/s |
| Cached
Disk |
92.32428
MB/s |
| Uncached
Disk |
3.027573
MB/s |
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| These
are great numbers at 500 Mhz. with the Integer and FPU score coming
in close to our test
on an Abit board at 515 Mhz. |
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| Winbench
99 1024X768, 16 Bit Color |
Freetech
P6F99 |
| WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2170
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| WinBench
99/Business Graphics WinMark 99 |
158
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| WinBench
99/CPUmark32 |
1230
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| WinBench
99/FPU WinMark |
2570
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| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
2170
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| Again
the P6F99 posts solid CPU scores. The disk scores are a little light
but respectable. We ran one more test just to see how the CPU scores
really match up. |
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SiSoft
Sandra 98 CPU Benchmark
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Good
stuff! Although the MIPs and MFLOPs don't correlate with the Wintune
98 numbers (synthetic benchmarks... got to love 'em), you can see
how we stacked up against a P2-400 on a BX chipset board... Smoked
it!
One more test
still to run now, showing you what it can deliver as a base for your
gaming rig!
3D
Mark99 - 800X600, Sound Off
Not too shabby
with the Banshee card installed. We've seen better scores with a TNT
board or SLI Voodoo 2s but these numbers hold their own. A quick
note on AGP Video Card compatibility. This particular SIS chipset
doesn't work with TNT based cards. A work around or patch is
forthcoming, so I am told, from SIS.
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Overall
Impression and Sound Performance
I thought
something was a little fishy when a chipset from Creative Labs was
being reported as having A3D support. Actually the above spec list
has an error. The chipset DOES support the Creative EAX API NOT A3D.
At least that's what we found in our tests. We ran Half Life to test
out the sound aspect of this board and its chipset. Half Life would
not initialize A3D but loaded EAX like a charm. The sound was rich
and spatial. I had a good sense of directional properties of the
sound sources in the game as well. All told the sound on this board
is an excellent version of Creative Labs latest sound technology.
The Freetech
P6F99 from Flexus is a solid motherboard that really performs well
and overclocks with the best of them. The on board sound features
are also a big plus and are up to today's standards for feature set
and quality.
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The P6F99 got a
Temp-O-Meter Rating of...
85
!
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| -Davo |
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