IDE Ports

The system board provides two fast IDE ports: primary channel and secondary channel.

Each port supports two devices for a total of four IDE devices. The system board allows the connection of an IDE CD-ROM drive for system configuration flexibility without the addition of a controller.

The IDE ports feature an enhanced IDE interface which supports up to 16.7 MB per second 32-bit wide data transfers on the high-performance PCI local bus. The standard hard drive and Zip® drive (in some systems) are connected to the primary channel. The CD-ROM drive is attached to the secondary channel.

I/O Ports

The system board features an enhanced parallel port, two buffered high-speed serial ports, and two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports.

The enhanced parallel port supports Enhanced Capabilities Port (ECP) and Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) modes for devices that require ECP or EPP protocols. These protocols allow high-speed bi-directional transfer over a parallel port and increase parallel port functionality by supporting more devices.

The two buffered high-speed serial ports use a fast 16C550 UART which supports transfer rates up to 115.2 kilobits (Kb) per second. These ports allow the installation of high-speed serial devices for faster data transfer rates.

The two USB ports allow additional new plug and play serial devices without removing the system cover. Simply plug the USB device into the port. The speed varies between 12 megabits per second (Mbps) for printers and 1.5 Mbps for mice and keyboards. Up to 127 USB devices can be connected to the computer.

The combination of the enhanced parallel port, buffered serial ports, and USB ports ensure optimum performance for future peripheral devices and operating systems.

Sound System

The system board features the Yamaha® DS1-L PCI accelerator and Analog Devices AD1819A SoundPort codec. The chips provide the following:

32-voice XG wavetable

3D stereo enhancement

Support for DirectX

TFull-duplex audio

PC/PCI support for legacy DMAC emulation.

Technical Information 1-9

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NEC SP B-Series manual IDE Ports, Sound System