System Overview 1-7
NOTE: The externally accessible drive bays at the front of the computer are
normally used for diskette drives, CD- ROM drives, and/or tape drives. Hard-
disk drives should be installed in the internal hard-disk drive positions
described in “Hard-Disk Driv e O ptions” f ound ear l i e r in this chapter. For detailed
information about the data storage subsy stem, see Cha pter 10, “Installing Drives,”
in the
User’s Guide
.
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SCSI drives are supported by using two integrated SCSI channels:
The primary (Adaptec AIC-7890) channel provides Ultra2/Wide LVD
(80-MB/sec) support for high-performance SCSI hard-disk drives and an
optional RAID subsystem.
NOTE: To achieve 80-MB/sec support, all of the installed SCSI devices
must support the Ultra2 specification’s 80-MB/sec transfer rate. If they do
not, the transfer rate will default to the speed of the slowest device in the
SCSI chain.
The secondary (Adaptec AIC-7880) channel provides internal Ultra/Narrow
and external Ultra/Wide (40-MB/sec) support for SCSI CD-ROM and tape
drives, optical drives, scanners, and so forth.
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The system board has an onboard 16-bit Crystal CS4237B audio controller ch ip
and connectors on the back panel for connecting the computer to external
audio devices such as speakers/headphones and microphone. The controller
supports all sound functions contained on the Sound Blaster Pro expansion
card from Creative Laboratories, Inc.
Chapter 6, “Using the Integrated Audio Controller,” in the
User’s Guide
pro-
vides instructions for connecting the computer to external audio devices and
configuring the integrated audio controller to avoid resource conflicts.
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The video subsystem consists of either a high-speed, high-resolution 2X AGP
or a PCI graphics adapter card. (For more information, see the documentation
that came with the graphics adapter card.) AGP greatly improves graphics per-
formance by providing a dedicated bus for a fas ter interf ace between the video
subsystem and system memory. AGP also allows conventional memory to be
used for video-related tasks.
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Dell Precision 610 mini tower systems contain an integrated 10/100-Mbps
3Com PCI 3C905b-TX NIC (uses a 3Com 3C917 application-specific integrated
circuit [ASIC]). The NIC subsystem connects to the Ethernet network through
a single RJ45 connector on the back panel of the computer.