Monday, March 19, 2001

Technical details

A good space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks but some of the larger one might be hard to fit.

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.

Two 2200Mfds and nineteen 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention bar is made of metal.

Two fan connectors are included.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the VT82C686B Southbridge, but does not allow users to select alarms to sound when the CPU reaches a certain temperature, or in the occurrence of a fan failure.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

This board supports the Dr. LED system - an example of which was supplied to us by AOpen. The Dr. LED is a 5 1/4" device that slides into an available drive bay of the same dimensions. Once the system in started, the LED system hails users with 8 lights which indicate the operational status of the keyboard, hardrive, audio system, PCI bus, video sub-system, memory, and processor.

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

Next: Special Features.