Friday, May 24, 2002

Technical details

A limited amount of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which will likely impede 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 when installing memory.

Nine 3300Mfds, and five 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located right behind the audio ports, which forces users to contour power cables over the heatsink. Not an ideal situation.

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, but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by an ITE IT8705F circuit.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

An HPT370 RAID controller is included, and supports RAID modes 0, 1, and 0+1. With the addition of this controller, upto 8 IDE drives can be connected to the motherboard simultaneously.

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

A VIA VT6202 USB 2.0 controller is included

The integrated C-Media CMI8738 sound-card supports upto six audio-channels in a 5.1 configuration.

A connector furnished with the board allows for the treatment of SPDIF (Sony/Phillips Digital Interface) signals via double-optic or gold-plated RCA jacks.

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

Next: Additional features.

Soyo KT333 Ultra