Freetech P6F91i Slot-1 i440BX ATX

Flexus Technology, under the Freetech brand name, is a fairly recent entry to the motherboard market. Founded in 1990, we're just now seeing their boards in computers everywhere. In their quest for motherboard excellence, their boards have been making the review rounds, now adding a third stop in the AnandTech labs. While Freetech boards can be hard to find, they are competitive with larger motherboard manufactures thanks to boards such as this. The Freetech P6F91i was a very stable board with all of the standard options but lacking some amenities.

New Anand Tech Report Card Rating
88/B

The Good

The P6F91i runs on the Intel 82440BX AGPset and can take advantage of up to 768 MB of SDRAM. It has a very similar layout to Freetech's P6F107, although it is a Slot-1 rather than a Socket-370 interface. This board features a 5/2/1 (PCI/ISA/AGP) slot configuration with a total of 3 DIMM slots. Neither of the ISA slots is capable of accepting full length cards, while all but one of the PCI slots can take full length cards.

The ATX specification is followed closely for the most part, with the ATX power cable being the only real exception. It's placed behind the Slot-1 connector, as shown in the picture, which forces the power cable to run over both memory slots and CPU adding to the jumble inside the case.

There are only two fan connectors on this board -- one directly to the left of the chip and the other below the PCI slots at the left front of the board. There were plenty of capacitors both around the chip and a few scattered around the board. There are four 2200uF capacitors, two 1500uF caps and one 1000uF cap along with multiple 330uF caps near the Slot-1 and smaller 100uF caps around the rest of board. Instead of the standard green heatsink Freetech decided to tone it down with a black heatsink mounted with thermal tape onto the chipset rather than grease or the more common spring clips. One advantage of using thermal tape instead of spring clips, is that the tape allows more heat to be transferred to the heatsink. CPU retention mechanisms come with the board, but have to be manually installed and will hold any Celeron, Pentium II, or Pentium III CPU. Unfortunately, Freetech did not include the diagnostic LED's that were found on the P6107 on this P6F91i. The LED's on the P6F107 would diagnose simple issues such as bad memory or video, making it easier for anyone to detect installation problems; a great addition for computer builders.