Cooling

The Northbridge fan air flow is 90° angled, which should improve CPU and video card temperatures.


On the southbridge you find a rather small passive heatsink. It will only get warm during use.


The RAMFlow cooling helps keeping your DDR2 memory cool. I find this is overkill for day to day use, since it considerably increases fan noise, but extreme overclockers will sure like it.


Dear ABIT, where are we supposed to plug in the RAMFlow fan? The only available fan header on the motherboard is right across the whole board.

Chips

The AA8XE Fatal1ty uses an IDT CV115-4 clock generator which is controlled by the uGuru chip.


Also controlled by uGuru is the Winbond monitoring chip 83627HF.


Network connectivity is provided by Intel, who have a very good reputation for building solid high performance network chips. Dual Gigabit would have been nice, but on the other hand, increasing the price even more for a feature not too many people will use does not make sense.


The Realtek ALC880 High-Definition Audio Chip is responsible for sound.


IEEE1394 is provided by a chip from Texas Instruments.