The SiS964 Southbridge gets quite warm itself and if you feel the need to slap on some a heatsink, Gigabyte includes two mounting holes. The SiS 655FX generates quite a bit of heat as well and we were a bit disappointed to see that Gigabyte decided to use a white thermal pad which made almost no contact with the Northbridge aside from the outer edges.

Lastly we were a bit surprised to see that Gigabyte did not include a clear CMOS jumper! Instead to clear the CMOS should you be a bit too ambitious in your overclocking, you need to short two solder points.

What is HyperStreaming?

Basically, HyperStreaming has been developed to deal with the problems faced due to bottlenecks within the northbridge-to-CPU, northbridge-to-southbridge, and southbridge-to-peripherial data streams. From memory bandwidth to the AGP bus, and high speed devices that use the PCI bus, more processing time is being taken by traditional PC architecture. SIS use the 'HyperStream' moniker to describe five key aspects of their technology which aims to speed up latency and inefficient data communication;

SiS did not introduce a new bus, they just optimized how data flows from the current PCI bus to the Southbridge, and how the data flows to the Northbridge and finally to the processor.