Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left around the CPU socket, which should permit for the installation of larger heatsinks.

The AMD761 Nothbridge is covered by a heatsink & fan.

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.

One 1500Mfd capacitor, and nine 1200Mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention lever is made of metal, thus alleviating any risk of it breaking.

Three fan connectors have been included, and all of them are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by an Asus AS99127F circuit.

Manual assignment of IRQs is possible, as is resource exclusion.

The (optional) sound-card is based on the C-Media CM8738 audio chip, and supports 4 simultaneous voices out.

A 3Com 3C920 10/100Mbps LAN Controller is available as an option.

The voltage regulation system is divided into planes a little in the same manner as on the Asus A7V, but, unlike the latter, the 2nd plane does not include a second card, but is located next to the disk connectors.

The AGP connector supports AGP Pro graphics cards.

A thermal sensor connector has been included.

A BIOS function by the name of "Super Bypass", as well as a Turbo mode, have been include, which allow for a noticeable gain in performance. "Super Bypass" for its part, consists of the reduction of latencies that occur between the processor and main memory.

The BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by hitting the "Insert" key at start-up.

Next: Additional features.