AMD has given the thumbs up to the latest mobo from FIC, the AD11 Socket A board. The board is the first motherboard supporting a 266MHz frontside bus to win accreditation from AMD.

The board is based on a hybrid chipset comprising AMD's 761 North Bridge and VIA's 686B South Bridge. The AD11 provides support for the Athlon up to 1.2GHz, as well as up to 850MHz for the Duron.

Since the FSB is the interface between the processor and the main memory it is a major bottleneck for processor performance.

With the introduction of DDR (double data rate) memory, which activates output on both the rising and falling edge of a clock cycle, the bus speed was upped from the standard 133MHz to 266MHz. This potentially doubles RAM speed.

The board also has AGP 4x, ATA-100 and four USB ports. The on-board audio - embedded in the South bridge - can be disabled in the BIOS. ®