Tuesday, June 18, 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.

Nine 3300Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located in the North-West corner of the motherboard, while the 12v is located on the East end. Thanks to this placement, the power cords should not interfere with CPU ventilation.

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

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

Five fan connectors are included, but only three are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards, but does come with a handy card-retention mechanism.

RAID 0+1 functionality is supplied by a Highpoint HPT374 controller.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit

An alphanumeric LED diagnostic panel in included as a standard feature.

An integrated Realtek RTL8100B 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller is included.

The ICH4 Southbridge controls six of the USB 2.0 ports, while a VIA VT6202 commands four others.

A thermal sensor connector is present, but a thermal sensor is not included.

And finally, in order to facilitate servicing when the box is open, two service interrupts are placed directly on the motherboard which can be used to start the system (JP7), or reboot it (JP6). These interrupts are backed-up further by a series of LEDs which indicate the state of the system, disk activity, the presence of the 5v voltage, and of reset.

Next: Additional features.

Abit IT7 Max