Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks - though user's may have some trouble with some of the truly massive behemoths on the market.

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 when installing memory.

Eleven 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 behind the audio and joystick assembly, which forces users to contort the power cables around the CPU.

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

Small metal tabs have been installed on each side of the CPU socket to protect the motherboard from scratch caused by the heatsinks retention mechanism clips.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink, but no fan.

Two fan connectors are included, both of which are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by an ITE8705F circuit.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

Next: Additional features.