Tul AX480A-GF (ATI Xpress 200P)
Expansion options
As we have already said, the ATI Xpress 200 chipset is shipped
with the south bridge IXP400. The latter offers integrated support for
four SerialATA channels.
There are respective connectors near the chip. Therefore, 8
hard disks altogether can be plugged in to Tul AX480A-GF: four disks
over the Parallel-ATA, with 4 over the SerialATA.
The board uses a RTL8110S LAN controller of 1Gbit/s bandwidth.
Unfortunately, engineers at Tul have used a scheme of the
Gigabit controller connection via the regular PCI bus, which slows down
the real data transmission speed. That seems somehow strange since in
this configuration PCI Express one bus line remains inactivated (to
which a Gigabit controller should have been fitted, which is logical).
Another oddity is related to support for the Firewire bus. In
particular, there is an additional VIA VT6306 controller with support
for three Firewire ports. However, wiring has been provided for only
two ports: one on the rear panel, with the other connected with a
brackets (missing in the package bundle).
Besides the Firewire, the board supports eight USB 2.0 ports,
four of which are positioned on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in
via brackets (the board comes bundled with one bracket for 2 ports).
A few words on the integrated audio based on the ALC850 codec.
The user gets an 8-channel audio subsystem, with the SP-DIF
input and output on the rear panel.
Note that SP-DIF connectors are positioned in the stead of one
of the COM ports. That COM port has been implemented via a bracket
(missing in the bundle), with the respective connector fitted near the
battery.
Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:
The are four jumpers on Tul AX480A-GF: JP4 is used for
clearing the CMOS settings (near the battery); JP1 - for tuning the
feature for wake-up on PS2 keyboard and mouse, JP2 and JP3 - for
wake-up on USB devices.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
