Throwback Time: Freeway Design FWD-P3C4XD

Back in late November 2000 I took a massive step forward and started doing product reviews.  Before that Ninjalane.com, the site that would eventually become Hardware Asylum, was dedicated to casemodding, system building and other enthusiast PC activities long before it was cool and commercialized.  At the time there were a handful of hardware review sites and only a few of them exist today.  (badge of honor)

The first product I ever professionally reviewed was from a company called Freeway Design.  They were a Japanese based manufacturer that built and distributed products out of Taiwan.  During that time I was on the hunt for a dual CPU motherboard using the new Pentium III socket 370.  I was a veteran user of SMP systems and wanted something special for my next build.  Well, special is what I got.

I believe the original press release was posted on Digitimes and showed a bright red dual socket motherboard built on the VIA VT82C694X chipset.  What was different about this motherboard wasn’t so much support for dual CPUs but that both CPU sockets were vertical along the motherboard whereas other boards of the time positioned them around the chipset making the board look cluttered.

The problem was, Freeway Design only sold in APAC (Asia Pacific) Region meaning that there were no retailers in the US where I could buy the board.  On a whim I emailed the contact listed in the press release asking if I there was a chance to buy the board directly

What happened next floored me (click bait anyone?)

Freeway Design offered to send me the board in an exchange for doing a review for my website.  It seemed crazy at the time but, they were a fairly new company looking to get some exposure and to this day I think I was one of three sites in the world to actually review a Freeway Design motherboard.

Of course, the rest is history.

The motherboard shown above is still fully operational and has two Pentium 3 800Mhz processors installed with Alpha heatsinks on each CPU.  This unique heatsink design used a series of extruded pins and instead of blowing air through the heatink it was designed to have air drawn up and away.  It was actually proven to be more efficient and still stands as one of the best bi-metal based heatsinks you could by.  The only downside was noise driven the high speed 60mm YSTech fans I had mounted on top.

So, what happened to Freeway Design?  A couple years after my FWD-P3C4XD review went live the company changed their focus and started building “white box” laptops and OEM style PCs and later leased out time in their factories to build a variety of different hardware similar to what Foxconn does.