1
Introduction
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DDR2 is a higher performance DDR technology whose
data transfer rate delivers bandwidth of 4.3 GB per sec-
ond and beyond. That is twice the speed of the conven-
tional DDR without increasing its power consumption.
DDR2 SDRAM modules work at 1.8V supply compared to 2.6V
memory voltage for DDR modules. DDR2 also incorporates new
innovations such as the On-Die Termination (ODT) as well as larger
4-bit pre-fetch against DDR which fetches 2 bits per clock cycle.
The onboard Realtek ALC885 is a High Definition audio
codec and the 6 audio jacks at the rear I/O panel pro-
vides 8-channel audio output for advanced 7.1-channel
super surround sound audio system. ALC885 also sup-
ports S/PDIF output, allowing digital connections with DVD systems
or other audio/video multimedia.
S/PDIF is a standard audio file transfer format that trans-
fers digital audio signals to a device without having to be
converted first to an analog format. This prevents the
quality of the audio signal from degrading whenever it is
converted to analog. S/PDIF is usually found on digital audio equip-
ment such as a DAT machine or audio processing device. The
S/PDIF connector on the system board sends surround sound and
3D audio signal outputs to amplifiers and speakers and to digital
recording devices like CD recorders.
Serial ATA is a storage interface that is compli-
ant with SATA 1.0 specification. NVIDIA
®
MCP51 supports speed of up to 3Gb/s. Serial ATA improves hard
drive performance faster than the standard parallel ATA whose data
transfer rate is 100MB/s.
The NVIDIA
®
MCP51 chip allows configuring RAID on
Serial ATA drives. It supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1
and RAID 5.
