Friday, November 03, 2000

The particularities

Resettable Fuse

Most motherboards use run-of-the-mill fuses in order to provide minimal protection from power-surges, and short-circuits from the USB bus or keyboard. The fuses are usually soldered onto the board, which makes them very difficult to remove, which in turn makes the board useless if the fuses burn out. The AX3S-Pro, on the other hand, uses resettable fuses which.... well, reset themselves after a surge has run its course.

Battery Less operation

The AX3S-Pro also incorporates a design which allows it to turn-off its internal battery while plugged-in. During such times, voltage is instead supplied by the ATX cable.

Die -Hard BIOS 100% virus protection

Recently, virus such as the CIH virus have proven capable of destroying data located on the BIOS. The AX3S-Pro, however, does not use a software-encoded BIOS, and is thus protected from this form of attack. A secondary BIOS is present, though, which can be used to flash the primary in such a case that the latter does become corrupted.

"Low ESR" 2200uf Capacitors

The quality of the capacitors on a motherboard plays a primary role in determining just how stable the board will be. The large-capacity 2200uf capacitors used by the AX3S-Pro are Low ESR for even better stability. Low ESR capacitors are introducing a highly reduced serial resistance in the circuit and therefore doesn't charge the circuit like would do a standard capacitor. The placement of the capacitors is also crucial to a system's stability, and AOpen has placed 7 nearby the processor slot itself, and 4 others nearby the memory slots.

Frequency Isolation Wall

The very placement of a motherboard's components and the circuit traces conducting to these components plays an important role in how much interference one trace engenders on neighbors traces. AOpen has gone to some lengths to reduce this "cross-talk" by making sure that the traces that route electronic signals, operate at frequencies within a certain range of each-other. This helps to reduce the induced noise caused by parasitic signals between traces.

Technical details

Very little clearance is available around the CPU socket, which makes it difficult, or impossible to install large heatsinks.

The memory slots have been placed far enough from the AGP port that there is no chance of the memory retention bars coming into contact with the graphics card.

Nine 2200Mfd Low ESR capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU retention bar is made of metal, but its shape is such that it may make the installation of a heatsink difficult.

Three fan connectors have been placed on-board.

Hardware monitoring is controlled through the internal circuitry of the chipset.

No option is provided allowing for the manual assignment of IRQs.

It is possible to reset the BIOS to the last batch of valid settings by simply hitting "Insert" during a reboot.

Next: Additional features.