Tuesday, December 03, 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 bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

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

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

The ATX connector is located in the North-West corner of the motherboard, while the 12V connector is located on the East of the CPU, on the North-end. This arrangement pretty much insures that power-cables won't get in the way of CPU ventilation.

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

The CPU retention bar is made of metal, so there's little chance of it breaking.

Five fan connectors are included, but only three are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

This board permits the manual assignment of IRQs.

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

A Highpoint HPT374 RAID controller is included, and supports RAID modes 0, 1, and 0+1.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83627HF circuit.

A big, bright LED diagnostic panel is included.

A Realtek RTL8100B 10/100Base-T Ethernet controller is included.

The ICH4 processor of the chipset adds support for six USB 2.0 ports, while the also-included VIA VT6202 chip supports four more.

Firewire support is made possible by a Texas Instruments TB43AB23 chip.

Finally, in order to facilitate servicing of the system when the case is open, two service interrupts have been placed on the motherboard itself. The first (JP3) allows the system to be started-up, and the second (JP2) allows it to be rebooted. The interrupt system is further enhanced by a series of LEDs that indicate the state of the system, hard drive activity, the presence of the 5V supply, and if the system is being reset.

Next: Additional features.

Abit IT7 Max2