ABIT AL8

Cooling

ABIT's standard chipset fan is used on the board, it is not loud and its speed can be controlled by the BIOS/uGuru software.


The southbridge does not need active cooling, it barely gets warm during use, even when overclocked.

Chips

ABIT uses the IDT CV151 clock generator on their board, it is controlled directly by the uGuru chip.


This is the heart of ABIT's uGuru. A chip made by Winbond which runs the uGuru software.


Winbond's W83627's hardware monitoring chip, also directly connected to uGuru, is monitoring the system's health state.


Broadcom's Gigabit Ethernet solution is directly connected to the chipset, it does not use any PCI-Express bandwith. While most people might ask "Why no Intel chip?" I must say, in my opinion, using an inexpensive network chip, which still performs well, makes sense for this more value oriented board.


As our tests will show later, the on-board audio of the AL8 is quite good, actually among the best we have tested so far. This is accomplished by using a Realtek ALC880 HD Audio chip.


Right next to the two extra SATA ports sits the Silicon Image SiL3132 SATA controller chip.


Like on most boards the Firewire chips comes from Texas Instruments.