Slots

When you first look at the slot setup you can easily get confused by all the slots and the stickers.
The top orange slot will be used when using the CPU socket on the motherboard with a PCI-E x16 video card.
The purple slot (2nd down) is used with the SIMA CPU add-in cards which are available for Intel Socket 479, AMD Socket 754 and AMD Socket 939. When the CPU card is installed, the top orange slot will be blocked by the CPU cooler, so you have to use the orange slot below the SIMA slot.

Cooling

The northbridge has a small cooler, which tends to get VERY hot, the Southbridge runs all passive and gets only mild warm.

Chips

ITE's 8705F is monitoring temperature, fan speed and voltages. It's one of the three most popular monitoring chips.


A Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet controller is used for the Gigabit Ethernet port.


Firewire (IEEE1394) comes from VIA. Their VT6307 chip is used.


The SiI 3132 chip adds an extra two SATA ports, for a total of six on the motherboard.


As clock generator the ICS953408 is used, which is a special design for SIS chipsets.


The Realtek ALC850 audio chip handles all on-board audio needs, like on most other motherboards.