Cooling

The small chipset fan is not too noisy, it should blend in with your CPU fan's noise.


The southbridge does not need active cooling, it barely gets warm during use, even when overclocked.

Chips

The ICS954127 is the clock generator used on the PF5 Extreme.


Winbond's W83627THF's hardware monitoring chip is monitoring the system's health state.


ECS uses a network chip from Marvell for the Gigabit interface, while a Realtek chip is used for the Fast Ethernet port. Both are a cost-effective solution.


As our tests will show later, the on-board audio of the PF5 is quite good. This is accomplished by using a Realtek ALC880 HD Audio chip.


A Silicon Image SiI3132 SATA controller chip handles the two SATA ports which ECS added to this board.


The Firewire interface is implemented by a VT6307 chip from VIA Technologies.