Food for thought...

[Mini-Me]

Modern PC motherboards are awesome bits of kit, and I see that a few now employ active cooling in the form of a heatsink/fan on the chipset!!!
The latest CPU I bought, had a 70mm fan and heatsink - only 10mm away from the same size they use in most PSU's and chassis...

The chipset fan fan-blades broke(when I accidentally got my finger in the way!), so I removed the old fan/heatsink, and was interested to see that the chipset(nVidia) was contained in something very similar to that of the older Intel Celeron 700 series chips, a green coloured IC encapsulation, with the heatsink clamped directly to the IC-die surface sticking up from the encapsulation(OK purists: it's not DIRECTLY to the die, but you know what I mean!)

I replaced the broken fan/heatsink with a spare heatsink/fan designed for a socket-7 CPU - fitted perfectly, and works, but kinda looks like I have a dual-CPU motherboard!!!
:D

Food for thought now that chipsets are becoming, in essence, self-contained computers...

[mjc]

Food for thought now that chipsets are becoming, in essence, self-contained computers...

HAve been for a while...and so have video cards...heck, even sound cards are going that way.

Before too longy you will have a dual core CPU, a GPU, an APU(?) and the chipset all considered actual 'procesors'.

Modern video cards come with more power and RAM than was required to run ME....

[Mini-Me]

Modern video cards come with more power and RAM than was required to run ME....

Exactly - mind boggling really, when you think about it!!!
:eek: