Chapter 1 - System Board 1-1Chapter 1 System Board1.1 FeaturesThis high-performance system board supports the Intel Pentium III procesorrunning at 500 and 550 MHz. Integrated with the Intel 440BX system controller,which consists of the PCI controller and the PCI/ISA IDE accelerator (PIIX4), theAltos 500 combines the new generation of Pentium III power with unmatchedgraphics performance.The system controller host bus interface supports a Pentium III processor with 66or 100 MHz external front side bus frequency. It also provides support for ECCsynchronous Registered DRAM (SDRAM) 168 pin DIMMs.The PIIX4 is a multifunction PCI device controller implementing system functionsincluding PCI IDE and universal serial bus (USB) host/hub. It also supports UltraDMA/33 synchronous DMA-compatible devices.The system board utilizes both ISA and PCI local bus architectures. Two ISA, fivePCI bus slots (including one PCI/ISA shared slot), and one AGP slot reside on thesystem board.Three memory banks composed of 168-pin dual inline memory module (DIMM)sockets support a maximum system memory of 768 MB using 256-MB DIMMs.The system board provides additional support for the USB (Universal Serial Bus)interface, and other standard features such as two UART NS16C550 serial ports,one enhanced parallel port with an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP)/ExtendedCapabilities Port (ECP) feature, a diskette drive interface, and two embedded harddisk interfaces.
