Monday, May 07, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for 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.

Four 3900mfd, three 3300mfd, and seven 1500mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

Power regulation is handled by triple-phase circuits.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

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

Three fan connectors are included (one of which is used by the Northbridge cooler), but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the chipset.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

Unfortunately the BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert" at start-up. If the system refuses to boot after fiddling with the BIOS, therefor, it becomes necessary to reset the whole kit & caboodle via an on-board jumper.

Next: additionnal features.