Monday, May 27, 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 to close to the AGP port, thus introducing the chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory. To be safe, users will need to remove their graphics card before installing memory modules.

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

Seven 3300mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The ATX connector is located near the IDE connectors, so the power cables shouldn't 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 IT8703F circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs, and exclude resources.

USB 2.0 ports are included, thanks to the VIA VT6202 chip.

Audio capabilities are provided by a C-Media CMI8738 sound-card.

IEEE-1394 "Firewire" ports (optional) are provided thanks to a Texas Instruments TB43AB21 chip.

RAID 0-1 functionality is provided by a Promise PDC20276 controller.

An AGP Pro connector is included.

This board "Q-Fan" technology, which allows the speed of the CPU-fan to be adjusted in response to changes in the temperature of the processor.

Asus C.O.P., and Asus Post Reporter technologies are included, which protect the CPU from overheating, and vocally alert the users of any troubles encountered at start-up.

A thermal-sensor connector is included.

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.

Asus A7V333