Wednesday, February 21, 2001

Technical details

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

No less than seven 3900Mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket. This is without a doubt the highest level of filtration we've seen on a motherboard.

The CPU retention lever 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.

An optional HPT370 RAID controller is available as an option.

An alphanumeric LED diagnostic panel is present.

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

Next: Additional Features.