Thursday, November 15, 2001

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks.

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.

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

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

The primary power connectors are located on the Northeastern corner of the board, while the 4-pin, 12v connector is located next to the Northbridge. As a result, no disruption of CPU-ventilation should occur.

The TH7-II's heatsink retention mechanism is quite robust, and easy to use.

The CPU retention bar 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 card-retention mechanism.

The integrated RAID controller is based on a HighPoint HPT370 circuit.

An alphanumeric LED diagnostic panel is present.

A thermal sensor connector is present, but no sensor is included.

An optional Intel 82562 PCI network controller is available.

Finally, in order to facilitate servicing, two momentary push-on switches are present on the board itself, one of which (JP5) can be used to start-up the system, the other (JP6) to reboot. These momentary switches are backed-up by a series of LEDs which indicated system status, drive activity, the presence of the 5v voltage supply, and activation of reset.

Next: Additional Features