Friday, October 26, 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 too close to the AGP port which introduces the chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card. This makes it necessary to remove any graphics card before installing memory.

Ten 1500Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located behind the audio ports. This is not an ideal placement, since it requires that the power cable be relayed in such a way that it may interfere with CPU ventilation.

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

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

Three fan connectors are included, all of which are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by an ITE IT8712F circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards.

The BIOS can be reset to its default settings by pressing "CTRL + Insert" at start-up. Please note that this does not "roll-back" the settings in question, but does in fact reset them to their defaults values. This function serves as a sort of replacement for the jumper which is usually used by motherboards for this purpose.

Next: Additional features.