Friday, January 18, 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 far enough from the AGP port that there is little chance of a retention clip coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

Six 3300Mfds, and three 1200Mfds capacitors have been installed around the CPU socket.

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

The ATX connector is located on the Northeast end of the motherboard, while the 4-pin 12v connector is located close to the Northbridge chip. As a result of this placement, the power cables shouldn't interfere with CPU ventilation.

The CPU locking lever is made of plastic, so handle with care.

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

It's possible to manually assign IRQs.

The AGP port does not support AGP Pro graphics cards, but does come with a handy card-retention mechanism.

A HighPoint HPT372 RAID controller is included.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit.

An alphanumeric LED diagnostic panel is present.

A thermal sensor connector is included, though it comes without an actual thermal sensor.

An integrated Intel 82562 PCI 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller is included.

An finally, in order to facilitate system servicing, two interrupts have been placed directly on the board that allow the system to be started (JP7), or rebooted (JP6). The interrupts are backed-up by a series of LEDs which are used to indicated the system's state, drive activity, the presence of the necessary 5v voltage, and of the reset function.

Next: Additional features