Acer 500L manual System Board

Chapter 2 System Board

This high-performance system board supports the Intel Pentium II CPU running at speeds ranging from 233 to 400 MHz. Integrated with the Intel 440BX system controller, which consists of the PCI/AGP controller and the PCI/ISA IDE accelerator (PIIX4), this system board combines the new generation of Pentium II power with unmatched graphics performance.

The PCI/AGP controller host bus interface supports a Pentium II processor with 66 or 100 MHz bus frequency. It also provides a 72-bit DRAM that supports synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) DIMMs. The PCI/AGP controller features an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) interface. Supporting up to 133 MHz data transfer speed, the AGP interface boosts graphics performance.

The PIIX4 is a multifunction PCI device controller implementing system functions including PCI IDE, universal serial bus (USB) host/hub, and enhanced power management. It also supports Ultra DMA/33 synchronous DMA-compatible devices.

The system board utilizes both the ISA and the PCI local bus architecture. Two ISA, five PCI bus slots (including one PCI/ISA shared slot), and one AGP slot reside on the board to allow installation of either master or slave devices.

Three memory banks composed of 168-pin dual inline memory module (DIMM) sockets support a maximum system memory of 384 MB using 128-MB DIMMs. The sockets only support SDRAM- type DIMM.

It also supports two USB (Universal Serial Bus) connectors, and other standard features such as two UART NS16C550 serial ports, one enhanced parallel port with an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP)/Extended Capabilities Port (ECP) feature, a diskette drive interface, and two embedded hard disk interfaces.

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