Thursday, February 14, 2002

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 when installing memory.

Four 2200Mfds, and nine 1500Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU-socket.

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

The ATX connector is located right behind the audio-ports, which makes installing the power cables very awkward.

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.

Three fan connectors are included, one of which is occupied by the Northbridge fan. Only two connectors are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by the chipset.

An integrated Highpoint HPT372 RAID ATA133 controller is included.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

And finally, the BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by pressing "Insert" at start-up.

Next: Additional features.