Wednesday, May 30, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks.

The VT8363A Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

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.

Seven 4700Mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

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

Three fan connectors are included, but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

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.

A HPT370 RAID controller is present, and allows for two additional drives to be set-up for RAID 0, 1 or 0+1.

An alphanumeric LED diagnostic panel is present.

Unfortunately the BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert" 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.

Next: Additional Features.