Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Technical details

Little space has been left open around the CPU socket, which will prevent 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.

Six 3300Mfds and twelve 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is ideally located on the North side of the motherboard.

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 used by the Northbridge fan. Only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

RAID capabilities are supplied by a Promise Technologies PDC20265R chip.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

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

And finally, as expected, the AK77 Plus benefits from many of the features that are standard on AOpen boards, including "Frequency Isolation Wall", Die-Hard BIOS", "Watch Dog Timer", "Resettable Fuses", and an optional LED diagnostic panel.

Next: Additional features.