Slots

The top white slot is the PCI-E x16 video card slot. The purple one is used for Crossfire and is running at PCI-E x4 when used.

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 10/100 MBit Ethernet. It's a really low-cost solution. Personally I don't think all this Gigabit Ethernet hype is good for the user. It adds to the board's price without really giving much of an advantage.


The Winbond W83195CG is the clock generator of the board.


The Realtek ALC660 audio chip is also a low-cost solution but does quite a good job.