Abit's Fatal1ty: Motherboards Go Premium

OTES

Even more impressive than this is Abit's OTES system, which encapsulates the voltage regulators under a huge plastic cover. This allows hot air to be efficiently extracted by two 40 mm fans installed at the backplane. Luckily, both fans are controlled by µGuru and thus work silently. Thanks, Abit!

If you detach the air ducting plastic cover (see below) you can look at the four-phase voltage regulators. Though the fins of the affixed heat sinks are not uniformly aligned in the air stream direction, the cooling effect should be good enough to keep the regulators cool. Abit refers to a maximum temperature of 50°C which would be a great result.

In addition to OTES, Abit offers an additional RAM cooling solution called OTES RAMFlow. This device is almost completely made of plastic and is mounted to the memory using a simple spring mechanism. It ventilates the memory modules with two 40 mm fans.

Altogether, a total of five component fans plus the CPU fans will be rotating in a Fatal1ty system. Even though each of these fans individually will be almost silent, the cumulative noise is quite audible.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.