Wednesday, September 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 bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

Eight 2200Mfds and four 1500Mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

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

The primary ATX connector is located on the eastern end of the motherboard, in front of the memory slots, while the 4-pin 12v connector is behind the audio ports. This arrangement forces users to contour power cables over and around the CPU, which is less than ideal.

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

The Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

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

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

This board permits the manual assignment of IRQs.

The AGP port supports both the AGP Pro and AGP 8X standards.

An HPT370 RAID controller is included, and supports RAID modes 0, 1, and 0+1. With the addition of this controller, up to 8 IDE drives can be connected to the motherboard simultaneously.

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

An integrated, six-channel, 5.1 environment C-Media CMI8738 sound-card is included.

A connector supplied with the motherboard takes charge channeling digital signals via SPDIF connetcors and RCA-jacks.

Bundled with this mainborad is the Sigma Box wich contains 4 front USB 2.0 ports

And finally, the BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by pressing "Insert" at start-up.

Next: Additinal features.

Soyo P4X400