Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of larger 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 1500Mfd, and one 3300fd capacitor have been placed around the CPU socket.

The electrical circuits are double-phase.

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

Three fan connectors are included, 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.

The Northbridge has been capped-off with a cooler.

Finally, Overclockers may be disappointed to learn that no feature exists that would allow the BIOS to be "rolled-back" to its last batch of valid settings. As a result, if the system refuses to boot following a particularly aggressive set of tweaks, it will be necessary to reset the BIOS using jumper JP5.

Next: Additionnal features.