Friday, October 12, 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.

Ten 2200Mfds and five 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located behind the audio ports, in such a position that it forces the power cable to be contorted around & over the heatsink, which is not an ideal situation.

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

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by an ITE IT8705F circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The AGP port support AGP Pro graphics cards.

A Promise Technologies PDC20265R RAID-chip is included, which supports RAID modes 0, 1, and 1 + 0; thus allowing up to 8 drives to be attached to the motherboard.

An integrated 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller is included as part of the VIA chipset.

The integrated sound-card uses the C-Media CMI8738 audio-chip, and supports up to 6 lines out in a 5.1 environment configuration.

A panel on the rear of the board takes charge of digital and SPDIF signals using double-optic RCA in & out ports.

Unfortunately the BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "CTRL + 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 jumper JP5.

Next: Additional features.