Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Technical details

The standard amount of space has been provided around the CPU socket in order to fit a P4 heatsink.

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

Eight 3300Mfds, and three 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector, and the 4-pin 12V connector are located behind the CPU socket, which obligates users to contour the power cables around it.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink, but not a fan.

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit.

This board does not permit the manual assignment of IRQs.

An integrated network controller comes as part of the chipset.

Dr: Voice II is included, with support for four languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, and German.

Dr: LED, and Die-Hard-BIOS are available as options.

A very interesting feature is included, which allows the system to be used as audio CD player. The system is booted in DOS-mode at start-up, thus bypassing the need to boot into Windows.

The BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert", or a similar hot-key at start-up. However, the "Watch Dog Timer" feature makes this rather irrelevant, by keeping track of the last batch of valid settings. If the system refuses to boot after a bit of tweaking, the Watch Dog Timer will wait 5 seconds before restoring the BIOS settings to a valid state. Needless to say, this is a very handy feature.

Next: Additional features

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