Friday, August 02, 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 two 2200Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX and 12v connectors are both situated behind the CPU socket, which forces users to contour the power cables around the CPU.

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.

It's possible to manually assign IRQs with this board.

A Realtek RTL8100BL network controller is included as an integrated feature.

The Dr: Voice II system is included, and is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, and German.

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

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 it 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

AOpen AX4B Pro 533