# Why no LAN, audio, etc. on chipsets.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-no-lan-audio-etc-on-chipsets/649828>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 9, 2013, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-no-lan-audio-etc-on-chipsets/649828 "2013-02-09T23:18:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Mdcastle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/958977/32.png) [@Mdcastle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mdcastle)\
**Post date:** [February 9, 2013, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-no-lan-audio-etc-on-chipsets/649828/1 "2013-02-09T23:18:16Z")

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Every motherboard I’ve seen has at least three seperate chips besides the chipset- an audio chip, an gigabit ethernet chip, and a Super-IO. Is there some reason they don’t include them onboard the main chipset. I can maybe see the advantage of a seperate audio chip to reduce the noise, but why not ethernet at least? When was the last time there was a motherboard without it?

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**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2013, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-no-lan-audio-etc-on-chipsets/649828/2 "2013-02-10T00:32:20Z")

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“Super I/O” chips are going away with the sunset of legacy ports; with so little demand for floppy drives, PS/2 mice and keyboards, serial/parallel ports, and with BIOS going away in favor of EFI, it’s better just to delete the chip than waste die area integrating it into the I/O hub.

as far as ethernet goes, I can only take a WAG so I’ll defer to anyone who might actually know the answer.