Friday, January 25, 2002

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks, though oversized units may find it to be a tight fit.

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.

Ten 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is ideally located on the North-side of the mobo.

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

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

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

Hardware monitoring is handled by an ITE IT8705F circuit.

The hardware monitoring system is capable of determining, and notifying if the processor is overheating. It further allows the system to be shutt down if the CPU-fan fails, or if the processor goes aver a pre-determined temperature.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

Next: Additional features.