Reinforcements: 6 New Athlon Boards With VIA's KT133A

Athlon Is Hot! Continued

Athlon uses a flip chip processor package, which means that the die is brought directly to the top without the use of a heat plate. Thus the heat can be transferred to the cooling device (copper is far the best choice) very easily. On the other hand the die becomes very delicate to physical damage. Be careful when mounting the CPU cooler!

NMC puts this sticker on the processor socket, which clearly points out to use thermal compound.

Soyo also put a little note on the CPU socket, alluding the necessity of a properly installed CPU cooler.

IDE RAID On Board

The IDE RAID controller chip from AMI is called MG80649 and provides two IDE channels, supporting RAID level 0, 1 or 10.

Promise's chip is named PDV20265R and comes with the same standard features like AMI.

Last but not least HighPoint also offers an IDE RAID controller. The HPT370 together with the Promise chip are widely used.