Friday, April 06, 2001

Technical details

The user's manual is well-illustrated, and very detailed. As a result, beginners should have no problems following along.

A fair amount of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of larger heatsinks.

The memory slots are located too close to the AGP port, thus introducing the chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card.

Seventeen 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention bar is made of metal, so there's no chance of it breaking.

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Windbond W83627HF-AW circuit.

No thermal sensor connectors are included.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The integrated sound-card is based on the Analog Devices AD1885 chip.

This board includes a number of AOpen technologies, such as "Low ESR" capacitors, "Frequency Wall Isolation" to reduce electrical interference, and "Resettable Fuses" to provide protection against short-circuits.

A Promise PDC20265R RAID controller supporting modes 0, 1, and 0+1 is included. As a result, a total of 8 IDE drives can be plugged in without the need of third-party expansion cards.

A very interesting feature dubbed "WATCH DOG TIMER" is included, which can be set to reboot the system under default settings after 4.8 second if the system does not boot-up after an Overclocking test.

The following features are offered as options: DIE-HARD BIOS, Dr. Led, and Dr. Voice.

One thing worth noting, is that support for ATA100 drives is an option. Thus, only ATA66 drive support is provided as a standard feature of the AX37 standard IDE controller.

The ability (or need) to re-set the BIOS at start-up time using a key-combination is, of course, made rather redundant by the "WATCH DOG TIMER" system.

Next: Additional features.