Monday, April 08, 2002

Technical details

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

The ATX and 12v connectors are located behind the audio ports, and next to the AGP port, which is a bit inconvenient, and forces users to contour cables around the CPU.

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

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.

Four 3300mfd, and four 1200mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention bar is made of plastic, so handle with care.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink, but no fan.

Three fan connectors are included, but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

Audio capabilities are provided by a C-Media CMI8738 controller

And finally, but 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.

Next: Additional features.