"TE Chea" wrote in message ...
nVidia & VIA chipsets are far cooler, I'll avoid AMD chipsets
after this Asus M2A-VM : I had to tape 7 hsinks, fit 1 fan to
cool this mboard 's pll ic & 4 regulators & 1 chip & chipset's
2 small hsinks. Luckily my small psu can cope so I need not
buy a bigger psu.

Its ATI ide*controller is 30-40x as hot as VIA kt266a 's, yet is
slower : my Maxtor ata133 hdd could score 61000+ kb/s in
Disk Checker using kt266a & applebred (K7), but just 52000
+ kb/s using ATI 's *& LE1620 (K8).

I built a system for my son with that exact mainboard with an AMD 5000+
Black edition which runs at 3.3Ghz (with a vcore bump) along with an eVGA
9600GT card and two 500gig SATA drives. It's truly stunning the amount of
heat this system dumps into a room....but it's a really good budget build
otherwise. Hate to have it in a room in summer without a/c though.