Wednesday, January 23, 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 - except for number "1" - seem to be 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.

Eight 3300Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located behind the CPU, where its cables tend to get in the way of CPU ventilation. It would have been better if Shuttle had tucked it away in a corner somewhere.

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 used by the Northbridge fan - but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

The RAID ATA133 controller is taken in charge by the Highpoint HPT372 circuit.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

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.