Thursday, January 31, 2002

Technical details

The standard amount of space has been provided around the CPU socket in order to fit a P4 heatsink.

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 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX, and 4-pin 12v connectors are located behind the audio ports, which is less than ideal. As it is, user's will be forced to string the power cables over or around the CPU, which could interfere with ventilation.

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

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.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards.

An integrated Promise PDC 20265R RAID controller is included.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

Finally, and unfortunately, the BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert", or a similar hot-key at start-up. If the system refuses to boot after fiddling with the BIOS, therefore, it becomes necessary to reset the whole kit & caboodle via an on-board jumper. This is a very unpleasant thing that enormously complicate the Overclocking of the system because each time the CMOS is cleared by the jumper, the whole BIOS setup needs to be done again

Next: Additional features