Thursday, May 23, 2002

Technical details

The standard amount of space has been provided around the CPU socket in order to fit a P4 heatsink.

The memory slots, with the notable exception of slot #1, 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.

Seven 3300Mfds, and two 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The 4-pin, 12v connector is located behind the CPU, while the ATX connector is located in front of it.

The CPU retention bar is made of plastic, so handle with care.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink, but not a fan.

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.


The BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert", or a similar hot-key at start-up. However, the "Watch Dog Timer" feature makes it rather irrelevant, by keeping track of the last batch of valid settings. If the system refuses to boot after a bit of tweaking, the Watch Dog Timer will wait 5 seconds before restoring the BIOS settings to a valid state. Needless to say, this is a very handy feature.

Next: Additional features