Slots

The slot configuration works good in my opinion. Even when installing a two-slot video card you still have access to once PCI port and one PCI-E x1 port. Let's hope the x1 port will be used more in the future.

ASUS supplies an HDMI card with the motherboard that goes into the x16 PCI-E port. Unfortunately this means that you can't build a super slim low-profile Media PC with this motherboard - at least if you want to use the HDMI feature.

Cooling

As you can see from these mini-heatsinks without fans, both the Northbridge and the Southbridge have a really low heat output. The same Northbridge will actually be used in notebooks, which should tell you enough about its power requirements and heat output.

Chips

ITE's 8716F monitoring chip is one of ITE's latest monitoring products. ITE is one of the leading companies on the monitoring chip market.


The RTL811B Gigabit Ethernet chip is connected via PCI-Express and is a good solution for offering cost effective high-speed networking.


Like many other ATI chipset based boards, the ASUS M2A-VM uses the ICS 951462 clockgenerator.


The Realtek ALC883 is a respin of the ALC882 series which doesn't have DVD audio but slightly improved SNR performance.

Capacitors

All capacitors on the board are from these two companies. It is good to see that ASUS doesn't use cheap low-quality capacitors on this budget board.