Cooling

In order to reduce temperatures around the CPU socket area, ECS added a small fan to the IO backpanel similar to ABIT's OTES. Unfortunately the fan is not temperature controlled, which means it is always running at full speed. ECS could have also optimized the cable length of the fan.


The chipset cooler is small and would not be loud if it was running alone, but together with the back exhaust fan, the motherboard's total fan noise is quite loud, I find it disturbing. Also the location of the chipset could be a bit further to the edge, so that the airflow is not blocked by the VGA cards. There is plenty of space near the ECS badge, anyway.

ECS Top Hat Flash

This little clever device is used, if you mess up the BIOS updating process and the system can no longer boot. Just put the Top Hat Flash on top of the existing BIOS chip (it will only fit one way).
If you power up your system now, the system will use the BIOS from the Top Hat Flash, instead of the BIOS on the soldered-on chip.

You can remove the Top Hat Flash once the system is running, so you can flash back to the motherboard's chip.

Chips

Hardware monitoring is provided by ITE's 8712F.


For networking, Albatron chose a Vitesse CIS8201 LAN Controller to implement Gigabit Ethernet via NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset. The second Ethernet port is 10/100 MBit capable and uses Realtek's RTL8100C chip.


The Realtek ALC850 Audio Chip is responsible for sound. It seems that it does not use NVIDIA's chipset, so you will have to install an extra driver for it. The advantage of this is, that audio does not suffer from the low quality of the nForce4 audio.


Silicon Image's SiI3132 provides two additional SATA-II ports, so you have a total of six ports, plus the two IDE channels.


From Texas Instruments comes the TSB43AB22A which offers up to two IEEE1394 interfaces for high-speed transfers of up to 400 MBps.