Friday, November 01, 2002

Technical details

The standard amount of space has been provided around the CPU socket in order to fit a P4 heatsink.

The memory slots are located too close to the AGP port, thus introducing the chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

The voltage regulation circuits are of the triple phase, bi-Mosfets variety.

Six 2200Mfds, and four 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

The ATX connector is located between the CPU socket and the memory slots, which means that the power cables should not interfere with CPU ventilation. The 12V connector is located behind the CPU.

Three fan connectors are included -- one of which is used by the chipset fan -- all of which are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit.

This board permits the manual assignment of IRQs.

RAID ATA133 support is provided by a Promise Technologies PDC20276 controller

Six-channel, 5.1 environment sound is provided by a C-Media CMI 8738 chip.

Firewire support is provided by the VIA VT6306 controller.

10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet functionality is provided by an Intel RC82540EM network controller.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards.

A four-LED diagnostic panel is present.

And finally, this motherboard comes complete with BlueTooth support, Live BIOS/Live Drivers, Fuzzy Logic 4, PC Alert 4, multilingual BIOS, Live Monitor, and Live Update 2.

Next: Additional features.

MSI 845PE Max2 FIR