Tuesday, July 24, 2001

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.

Eleven 2700Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The voltage regulation circuits are of the triple phase variety.

The ATX connector is located right behind the CPU socket, which makes things rather awkward when its plugged in. It would have been much more convenient to have it placed towards the side of the board.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and a fan.

Four fan connectors are included - one of which is occupied by the Northbridge fan. Only two connectors are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

Next: Additionnal features.