Slots

The highlight here are of course the two PCI-E x16 slots which run in x16 even when they are both in use. The yellow slot covered by the sticker is the Future CPU port which can be used together with an AMD Socket AM2 riser card to accommodate the new AMD CPUs scheduled for release in Q2 2006.

Cooling

The northbridge cooler gets quite warm during heavy use but still not hot enough to need active cooling. The Southbridge runs all passive and warms up only a little.

Chips

Winbond's W83627 is monitoring temperature, fan speed and voltages. It's one of the three most popular monitoring chips.


This Realtek chip does Gigabit Ethernet which is another change to the 939Dual-SATA.


As clockgenerator the Realtek RTM866-895 chip is used.


The Realtek ALC660 audio chip is also a low-cost solution. Strangely the onboard audio is a lot worse than on the 939Dual-SATA2.