Wednesday, December 12, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks.

The SDR memory slots are located far enough from the AGP port that there is little chance of a retention clip coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory. The DDR memory slots are located much too close, however, such that their clips will undoubtedly come into contact with the graphics card when installing new modules.

Fifteen 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located between the memory slots and the floppy-drive connector, so its wires shouldn't interfere with CPU ventilation.

The CPU retention bar is made of metal, so there's little chance of it breaking.

Three fan connectors are included, all of which are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by Asus AS98127F circuits.

An extra thermal-sensor connector is included.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

It's possible to exclude IRQ, DMA, and UMB resources.

While the A7A266's BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by pressing "CTRL + Insert" or "CTRL + Home" at start-up, it isn't content to simply leave it at that. In fact, if the system absolutely refuses to restart following an Overclocking trip gone horribly wrong, simply turning-off, and then turning the system back on will transport users straight to the BIOS. From their, it can either be reconfigured, or reset to its default state.

Next: additional features.