Cooling

The Intel chipset is cooled by a big passive heatsink. It does get quite warm during use, but since overclocking is rather limited by the BIOS this will not be an issue.


The southbridge does not need active cooling, it barely gets warm during use, even when overclocked. The AOpen logo on the heatsink gives it a unique touch.

Chips

The RTM862-480 from Realtek is a rather uncommon clock generator. More popular are models from ICS.


Winbond's W83627's hardware monitoring chip is tracking voltages, temperature and fan speeds.


The Realtek RTL8110SB is a cost effective solution to implement Gigabit Ethernet.


The Realtek ALC880 HD Audio chip does a great job when it comes to on-board audio.


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


This is the first time I see a Firewire chip from agere, usually Texas Instruments and VIA chips are used.


Since this board offers TV/HDTV out the VGA signals from the Intel chipset's integrated VGA have to be converted to a Component Signal somehow. This is accomplished by this Chrontel CH7021A-TEF chip. It offers HDTV modes from 480i to 1080P, as well as NTSC, PAL and SECAM color.

Capacitors

AOpen uses only capacitors from Rubycon on this board.