Tuesday, December 17, 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 too close to the AGP port, thus introducing the chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

Six 3300Mfds, and three 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located close to the memory slots, whereas the 4-pin 12v connector is located behind the CPU.

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

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.

This board does not permit the manual assignment of IRQs.

An integrated Realtek RTL8100BL network card is included.

Serial ATA capabilities are supplied by a Promise Technologies PDC20375 chip.

Two FireWire/IEEE1394 ports are made possible by the integrated Texas Instruments controller.

Dr: Voice II technology is included, and supports the following four languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, and German.

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

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 this 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 AX4PE