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AOpen's Innovative Design! 1. Power Bridge All conductors resist the flow of current to some extent and in order to eliminate resistance to minimum, a most economical way to reduce resistance is to make conductor as efficient as possible by providing so-called ''conduit'' to channel the current flow. Resistance also creates heat and it has to be reduced to a controllable level. What AOpen engineers are doing is to provide a better path to reach optimum power route to efficiently deliver power (both voltage and current) to destination without creating heat that's normally accompanied by high current with resistance during the journey. In a typical motherboard design, there are 4 layers of copper for the entire circuitry where both VCC and ground are sandwiched between solder side and component side. In the older generation motherboard when bus speed and component numbers are low, it is quite sufficient, but as the performance of today's personal computer has reached to PC133 and operating over 1GHz in CPU speed, the old method seems to be crippled by dilemma. Today's motherboard design faces challenge of providing fast speed with low noise that is detrimental to the system stability. In order to provide every critical part of circuitry within the PCB, AOpen deploys a new design concept called 'Power Bridge'. These bridges are strategically place within the motherboard design that provides both voltage and current to a targeted PCB region. This extra power is so pure that it contains no inherit noise when travel through VCC and ground plane. Further, since the extra power is via 'Power Bridge', PCB VCC and Ground will have lesser current flow through and lesser thermal problem. Benefits 1. Increase current flow and eliminate accompanied heat 2. Even current distribution within motherboard 3. Better PCB layout and component placement Voltage variation amount all PCI connectors can be reduced to almost minimum to increase overall system stability when heavy power-consumption card such as 64MB AGP card is plugged. *AX3S Pro II is now equipped with this amazing feature.
2. Vishay Resistor AOpen has found a way to dramatically improve overall system stability by having both clock generator and power circuitries modify to achieve highest possible stability. By using Vishay military-grade resistors, AOpen engineers are able to eliminate clock error (jitter) down to omit level. Clock stability is so crucial that it can be attributed to system crush, hang and blue screen under Windows environment. In order to provide precision voltage to the CPU, AOpen also deploys Vishay military-grade MIL-R-26 Qualified wire-wound resistor that its tolerance is less than 0.05% within the operational temperature from 5 to 85 degrees Celsius. This deployment of Vishay wire-wound resistors are so crucial to Overclocking the motherboard when CPU Vcore can be adjusted to meet requirements. These Vishay wire-wound resistors have the following features that cannot be found in typical commercial grade resistors:
1. High temperature silicon
coating Benefits
1. Accurate and regulated
voltage for critical circuitry *AX3S Pro II is now equipped with this amazing feature.
3.
Dr.
Voice
The
Dr. Voice is a great feature of AOpen motherboard. It can
let you easily to know what kind of problem occurred. It can clearly ''tell''
whether there is a component issue or an installed issue, such as CPU, memory
module, VGA, PCI add-on card, FDD, HDD or keyboard by voice. The Dr. Voice provides
four kinds of language version, English, German, Japanese and Chinese
for choosing. You can select preferred language version by JP15 & JP16.
By the way, if you want to disable Dr. Voice, please short the pin 2 & 3 of
JP36 by jumper cap.
4.
Dr. LED
In conjunction with Dr. LED (Upgrade
Optional), which can easily show what kind of problem you may incur on your system
during assembly. It can clearly indicate whether there is a component issue or
an installed issue by the 8 LEDs on the front panel of Dr. LED. This helps you
quickly self-diagnostic your system status.
Dr. LED is a CD disc storage box with
8 LEDs on its front panel, the size of Dr. LED is exactly the same as 5.25 in
floppy drive, so that it can be mount into normal 5.25 in drive bay of any housing.
The total 8 LEDs light up alternatively
if the system fails in one of eight stages. Once the LED7 (latest LED) is lit,
this indicates that the system has completed its boot-up procedure. The 8 LEDs
indicate the following messages when lit:
LED 0 - Indicates that the CPU may have
been installed incorrectly or is damaged.
5. DIE-HARD BIOS Recently, many viruses have been found that may destroy bios code and data area. This motherboard implements a very effective hardware protection method that does not involve any software or BIOS coding, hence is 100% virus free. There is a BIOS flash ROM mounted on the M/B when you get it. If you want to add extra BIOS flash ROM, please contact the local distributor or reseller. You also can link to AOpen official website: http://www.aopen.com by Internet to purchase it.
External Controller provides you a better and convenience way to switch the BIOS status between "Rescue" and "Normal" without opening the case of your computer. You have to plug the jumper cable to the connector pin (JP30) on the motherboard. Be careful of the orientation when you connect, the red wire should correspond to Pin1. Note: If you suspect your BIOS is infected by virus, just rescue your bios by following steps:
1. Turn off the system, set
the External Controller to "Rescue" to read from rescue ROM.
Last Update: 2001/04/17 |