Southbridge - SB700 With 14 USB And 6 SATA Ports
With the introduction of the 780G chipset, AMD is finally retiring its completely outdated SB600 southbridge, and officially introducing its successor, the SB700.
AMD's SB700 southbridge
The older SB600 southbridge chip
On the left we have the SB700, with the SB600 on the right. The die size remains unchanged.
When AMD launched its Phenom processor towards the end of last year, the company promised that the new SB700 would make its way onto the AMD770 and AMD790 boards of various motherboard companies as early as the beginning of 2008. However, this was a creeping process at best. With the introduction of the 780G/V line, the SB700 is now officially a part of this chipset. The most important improvements present in the SB700 are the inclusion of S-ATA 300 as well as 14 USB ports. Of the USB ports, 12 support USB 2.0, while two are USB 1.0 compliant for use with mice or keyboards. As promised by AMD in advance, the performance of the USB controller also improved: in our tests, read performance increased quite noticeably, by 18.1%.
A comparison of the coolers for the SB700 (left) and SB600 (right).
The cooler of the new southbridge is only slightly larger than that of the older one.