Monday, January 21, 2002

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks, though there may not be enough clearance for truly oversized units.

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.

Nine 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, which forces the power cables to be contorted over and around the CPU - not an ideal situation.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

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 supports AGP Pro graphics cards.

A Promise PDC20265R RAID 1, 0, and 0+1 capable controller is included, which allows the board to support up to 8 IDE drives simultaneously.

The LAN Ethernet 10/100 base-T controler is integrated to the chipset.

The integrated audio-card is based on the C-Media CMI8738, which supports 5.1 environments, and 6 audio out channels.

An additional connector included for the rear panel takes charge of digital and SPDIF signals via optical fiber connectors and RCA in/out jacks.

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.