Tuesday, January 22, 2002

Technical details

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

The memory slots are located far enough from the AGP port that there is little chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

Twelve 2700Mfds 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 to the Northwest of the CPU socket, which causes the power connectors to get in the way. It would have been better to have placed them in the corner.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink, but no fan.

Three fan connectors are included, but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

An integrated Promise PDC20265R RAID-controller is included.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

And finally, the BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by pressing "CTRL + Insert" at start-up.

Next: Additional features.