Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Technical details

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

The memory slots - save perhaps for numbers 1 and 2 - 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.

Two 4700Mfds and five 3300Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located between the CPU-socket, and the memory slots, where its cables shouldn't interfere with CPU-ventilation.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

Five fan connectors are included, one of which is employed by the Northbridge-fan. Only two of the connectors are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

A thermal-sensor connector has been included.

An integrated Highpoint HPT372 ATA133 RAID controller is included.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

Next: Additional features.