Cooling

Neither Northbridge nor Southbridge need active cooling. ATI has spent considerable time improving the chip design to reduce heat output. Being built on a 0.11u process helps RD580 reduce the cooling requirements even more. ATI is talking about a TDP of only 7 to 8 Watts.

The ULi Southbridge is passively cooled as well.

Chips

The motherboard monitoring market is shared pretty much between Winbond and ITE. Here the ITE8712F is used.


I'm not sure who needs Dual Gigabit Ethernet but it's nice to have. Both chips come from Marvell and are cost-effective networking solutions. One port is connected via PCI-Express, the other one via the good old PCI bus, I doubt you will be able to achieve full speed Gigabit with that one.


RD580 requires a new clock generator design. The ICS 951422 is one of the first RD580 clock generators which support overclocking well.


The Realtec ALC882 sound chip is an updated version of the ALC880 and supports Intel's High-Definition Audio standard. Unlike the ALC882D this chip does not support Dolby Digital Live.


On the board you will find two IEEE1394 ports which are connected to this Texas Instruments IEEE1394 controller. One port is on the back panel, the other one as header on the board, where you connect the external bracket to.

Capacitors

ASUS uses capacitors from United Chemi-Con (KZG) and Sanyo (SEPC).