A smattering of chips
Although the AV8 may not double-up on peripherals, there are still plenty of chips dotting the board's landscape. The most garishly decorated of those chips is VIA's K8T800 Pro north bridge, which lurks under a bright blue heat sink. You can learn more about the K8T800 Pro chipset in our review.

The K8T800 Pro north bridge hooks up to the AV8's south bridge chip, VIA's VT8237, with an Ultra V-Link interconnect that boasts over 1GB/sec of bandwidth. The VT8237 serves up two channels of ATA/133, two channels of Serial ATA 150 with RAID 0 and 1 support, eight USB ports, and six channels of AC97 audio.

Abit pairs the VT8237's integrated audio controller with Realtek's ALC658 codec, extending the mighty crab's dominance to yet another motherboard. Inexpensive codecs like the ALC658 generally don't produce high quality analog output, but you can get around that by using the AV8's digital S/PDIF output port.

Although the VT8237 south bridge has a built-in 10/100 Fast Ethernet controller, Abit shuns it in favor of VIA's VT6122 Gigabit Ethernet chip. The VT6122 has a 32-bit PCI interface, forcing it to share a limited 133MB/sec of PCI bus bandwidth with other devices.

On the AV8, the only other PCI-based integrated peripheral is VIA's VT6306 Firewire controller. Between that and the VT6122 GigE chip, 133MB/sec should be plenty. However, if you plan on adding extra PCI cards to the board, be aware that bandwidth is limited.

One chip that won't be vying for PCI bus bandwidth is Abit's uGuru chip. Peeling back the hologram-encrusted sticker reveals Winbond's W83L950D "mobile keyboard and embedded controller." This chip is the brain behind Abit's uGuru hardware monitoring, which offers a staggering array of fan speed, temperature, and even voltage monitoring capabilities in both the board's BIOS and in Windows. I'll get to the AV8's BIOS in a moment, but you can learn more about Abit's uGuru Windows software on this page of my Abit KV8 Pro review.

Before I wrap up the hardware side of the AV8, it's worth noting that the board uses Japanese-made Rubycon capacitors throughout. Japanese capacitors were largely immune to the leakage problems that plagued some cheaper capacitors several years ago, so it's comforting to have the Rubycons onboard.