Anand Tech Report Card Rating
90/B+

The Good

Like Shuttle's HOT-591P, the FIC VA-503+ gives new meaning to the title "Baby AT Form Factor" as the board measures in just under a 9" x 9" square, the decrease in PCB size (Printed Circuit Board) is reflected greatly in the $106 price of the board which should definitely be a plus for those on a tight budget yet looking for the most bang for their buck.   Unlike Shuttle's MVP3 board however, the VA-503+ allows for a single PCI slot to be populated by a full length PCI card.  The last of three PCI slots just barely clears the CPU Socket by about a centimeter allowing for a Voodoo2 accelerator or other full length PCI card to be installed.  On the opposite end the first two of the three ISA slots on the VA-503+ can accept full length cards, while the third slot falls in the path of the CPU Socket making a full length card a no-go in the last ISA slot.   The memory expansion slots on the VA-503+ are reminiscent of those found on the old Intel TX based FIC PT-2007 as they come in the original 4 SIMM + 2 DIMM combination.   Provided you have some decent quality 60ns or faster EDO SIMMs laying around, those 4 SIMM slots won't go to waste as the MVP3 chipset found on the board will enable you to lock the Memory Bus (the speed at which your memory operates at) at or around the 66MHz marker, even if the Front Side Bus (FSB - speed from which your CPU/L2 cache derive their clock speeds) is running at 100MHz.

The VA-503+ fully supports a wide variety of FSB Speeds and Core Voltages to cover virtually all possible standard and overclocked settings you may wish to run your processor at.  The 60/66/75/83/100MHz FSB settings are all documented in the manual, with the 90MHz and 112MHz settings undocumented but present and available for use if you feel like pushing your luck.  The standard clock multipliers available for use range from 1.5x to 5.5x, in theory providing support for clock speeds in excess of 500MHz, however in reality you shouldn't expect to exceed the 400MHz (100MHz FSB x 4.0) limit anytime soon, but it is nice to know that the option is there.  For the tweaker in all of us are 14 different core voltage settings ranging from 2.0v to 3.3v separated by 0.1v increments, this feature seems to be increasingly popular among Super7 motherboard manufacturers, whether undocumented or officially supported in the manual these "in-between" settings come in handy, especially if you happen to be overclocking.  If you aren't overclocking your system, you may want to try decreasing the core voltage of your CPU by 0.1v to see what happens, many times you will be able to stay within the operating specification of the processor while eliminating a small percentage of heat generated by the CPU. 

Naturally FIC included their standard Mainboard Manual which contains all of the appropriate information a decent manual should, accompanying the written documentation is FIC's own Drivers CD which contains the latest VIA Bus Master Drivers and the latest revision of the AGP GART VxD.  For those of you planning to use an i740 based Video Card such as the Real3D Starfighter or the Shuttle HOT-158 with VA-503+ or any MVP3 based motherboard with AGP 2X for that matter you will be out of luck until VIA publicly releases the next major revision of their AGP Virtual Device Drivers, so you may want to hang on to your old PCI or standard AGP video card before making the jump into the i740 board with your VA-503+. 

The performance of the VA-503+ was definitely top notch among all MVP3 based boards, and the board came out on top among its AT brothers mainly due to the presence of a full megabyte of L2 cache which, along with extending the cacheable memory limit to 256MB (from 128MB for 512KB of L2 cache), increases the performance of the system as a whole by a marginal but measurable amount.  For an AT MVP3 motherboard, the FIC VA-503+ definitely has it together...but there is naturally a set of complementary flaws present in the VA-503+'s design...what exactly are they?   Let's find out...

The Bad

Even though the VA-503+ has a single PCI slot which will accept a full length card, this does prevent you from running a Dual Voodoo² configuration in Scan Line Interleave mode unless you want to shell out the big bucks for a single board SLI Voodoo² card from Quantum3D. 

One complaint that must be brought up about the VA-503+ is the beyond poor Jumper Setup, for the most part, all MVP3 boards have a fairly complex jumper setup however the VA-503+ almost completely redefines the word complex with its initial setup.  Not only does the written documentation mis-represent two jumper blocks (the location of the SDRAM1-3 and FREQ1-3 jumpers are switched) which is confusing enough, but the jumpers are in difficult to reach areas and require much patience to complete the initial setup process.  The only semi-decent jumper block was the voltage jumper block which is located on a far corner of the motherboard, away from pretty much everything...unfortunately the same isn't true for the SDRAM clock, Clock Multiplier, and FSB jumpers. 

The board AnandTech used for testing wouldn't boot at the 112MHz FSB setting regardless of what processor/memory was used, however reports of a fully functional 112MHz FSB setting have been popping up all over the 'net, so approach using that setting at your own risk (the setting is CLK1-3: 1-2, 2-3, 2-3).  

While the VA-503+ is technically an AT Form Factor motherboard, it would've been nice if FIC had actually included an ATX P/S connector on the board like most other manufacturers for convenience if nothing else, just one more desire left unfulfilled by the VA-503+.

• Allows user to individually set IRQs for each Legacy ISA card

• Allows user to assign IRQ for VGA Card

BIOS Settings

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: AMM PC100 SDRAM, Azzo PC100 SDRAM, Corsair PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64 AMM PC100 SDRAM, 1 x 64 Azzo PC100 SDRAM, 1 x 64MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: Advanced American Megatrends Technologies
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.megacom.com

Manufacturer: Azzo Computers
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.azzo.com

Manufacturer: Corsair Microsystems
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.tccomputers.com/

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

How I Tested

• Each benchmark was run a minimum of 2 times and a maximum of 5 times, if the motherboard failed to complete a single test within the 5 allocated test runs the OS/Software was re-installed on a freshly formatted Hard Drive and the BIOS settings were adjusted to prevent the test from failing again.  All such encounters were noted at the exact time of their occurrence.

• Business Winstone 98 was run at each individually tested clock speed, if reliable scores were achieved with the first two test runs of the suite an average of the two was taken and recorded as the final score at that clock speed.  If the test system displayed erratic behavior while the tests were running or the results were incredibly low/high the tests were re-run up to 5 times and an average of all the test runs was taken and recorded at the final score at that clock speed

• After each motherboard was tested a complete format of the test hard drive was initiated and the OS/benchmarking software was re-installed afterwards a defragment was initiated using Windows 95's Disk Defragmentation Utility

• No foreign drivers were present in the test system other than those required for the system to function to the best of its ability

• All foreign installation files were moved to a separate partition during the test as to prevent them from effecting the test results

• All tests were conducted at 800 x 600 x 16-bit color depth

The Final Decision

If you don't mind its flaws, then the VA-503+ seems to be a very promising Super7 motherboard, especially with its optional 1MB L2 cache from a performance perspective.  If you happen to be a beginner however, you may want to consider the TMC TI5VG+ instead since the jumper setup of the VA-503+ can be a bit intimidating to those that aren't too experienced.