Plug And Play; Chassis; Pci Local Bus - NEC POWERMATE ENTERPRISE NETPC Service Manual

Technical Information 1-15

Plug and Play

The system comes with a Plug and Play BIOS in support of Plug and Play technology. Plug
and Play simplifies setup procedures for installing Plug and Play expansion boards. With
Plug and Play, adding a Plug and Play expansion board is done by turning off the system,
installing the board, and turning on the system. There are no jumpers to set and no system
resource conflicts to resolve. Plug and Play automatically configures the board. (Some Plug
and Play devices may need to be jumpered if used in a system running the Windows NT
operating system.)

Chassis

The NetPC chassis is divided into two sheet-metal halves. The system has one 3.5-inch
drive slot for a hard drive and one add-in card slot, which accepts a half-length PCI card.
The dimensions of the chassis are included in Table 1-16.
Power connections to the system board are carried through the riser card, which also
contains the half-length PCI card slot.

PCI Local Bus

The 32-bit PCI bus is the primary I/O bus for the system. The PCI bus is a highly-integrated
I/O interface that offers the highest performance local bus available for the Pentium
processor. The bus supports burst modes that send large chunks of data across the bus,
allowing fast displays of high-resolution images.
The PCI bus operates at half the Pentium processor's bus speed. The PCI bus supports
memory transfer rates of up to 105 MB per second for reads and up to 120 MB per second
for writes, depending on processor configuration.
The high-bandwidth PCI bus eliminates the data bottleneck found in traditional systems,
maintains maximum performance at high clock speeds, and provides a clear upgrade path to
future technologies.
PCI expansion slot connector pin assignments are provided in Appendix A.