Cooling

The northbridge is only passively cooled. This is great for people, who want to reduce their computer's sound level. The lack of an active northbridge cooler, will be the limiting factor once you start overclocking and get into the 300 FSB region. During our overclocking tests the northbridge reached temperatures of 90°C+.


Cooling on the southbridge is passive, not much heat is generated here.

Chips

Albatron uses a CV155-4 clock generator from IDT on the PX925XE.


The two IDE RAID ports are powered by ITE's 8212F RAID controller chip.


Hardware monitoring is provided by a Winbond W83627THF.


For networking, Albatron chose a Broadcom LAN chip with Gigabit Ethernet support. The second port, with 100 MBit, is powered by VIA. Both chips are fine, but do certainly not have the quality of an Intel networking solution, but also not the price.


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