Tuesday, April 23, 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 - save for the notable exceptions of numbers 1 and 2 - 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.

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

Two 4700mfds, five 3300mfds, and two 2200mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention bar is made of plastic, so handle with care.

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

Five fan connectors are included, but only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

USB 2.0 (480Mbits/sec) are included, and are supported by a VIA VT6202 chip.

RAID capabilities are supplied by a Highpoint HPT374 controller.

An integrated Realtek ALC650 audio-chip is included.

FireWire IEEE-1394 ports are included, and are made possible by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23.

A Realtek RTL8100B is present, and supplies 10/100Base-T Ethernet connectivity.

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.