Friday, September 14, 2001

Technical details

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

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.

Twelve 1500Mfd, and four 2200Mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

The ATX connector is located on the North end of the motherboard, so it shouldn't interfere with ventilation.

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

Four fan connectors are present - including the one used by the Northbridge fan - but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the chipset.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The integrated sound-card is based on the C-Media CMI-8738, and supports up to 6 audio output channels in a 5.1 environment.

Super Audio is available as an option, and allows for the input/output of SPDIF signals using either RCA jacks or optical connectors.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards.

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

Next: additionnal features.