Cooling

Chipset and southbridge are passively cooled, they only put out a few watts. Together with a silent 1U CPU cooler you can build a very slim and quiet media PC system which still has massive CPU processing power. TV out of the onboard-VGA is available via a header on the motherboard.

Chips

Hardware monitoring is done by ITE's 8712F - one of the most common ones, so it will be easy to find software support.


A Realtek 8100C Ethernet controller handles the 10/100 MBit network connection. Given the current cost of Gigabit ethernet chipsets, the added few bucks would have been worth it in my opinion.


More Realtek chips: An ALC655 6-channel audio chip from Realtek gives you a surprisingly high-quality 6-channel audio.


ATI chipsets need a special clock generator to supply clocks to the onboard-VGA. Another specialty of the RS400 chipset is that the memory clocks are completely independant from FSB, so if you set memory clock to 200 MHz, you can freely change FSB without effect on the memory clock. ICS' 951413 clock generator handles these tasks.