Friday, June 14, 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 are located to close to the AGP port, thus introducing the 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 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 no 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 not possible to manually assign IRQs.

An integrated Realtek RTL8100BL network controller is included.

An integrated 2D/3D graphics card is included.

The Dr: Voice II system is included, and can speak in English, Chinese, Japanese, and German.

Dr: LED, and Die-Hard-BIOS are available as options.

Unfortunately 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. If the system refuses to boot after fiddling with the BIOS, therefor, it becomes necessary to reset the whole kit & caboodle via an on-board jumper. 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

AOpen AX4G Pro