Thursday, August 16, 2001

Technical details

Very little space has been left open around the CPU socket, which will likely prevent 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.

Two 3900Mfds and nine 2200Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

The voltage regulation circuits are of the triple phase variety.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan..

The ATX connector is located behind the processor socket on the North side of the board, so it shouldn't interfere with ventilation.

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

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the chipset.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

The BIOS reset jumper is inconveniently located in the Northeast corner of the motherboard, which makes it nearly impossible to get to when the board is installed in a casing.

Next: Additionnal features.