We've seen AMD's 690G motherboard chipset before, but Gigabyte's GA-MA69G-S3H is the first ATX board we've seen to use it. This gives more room for expansion ports over the microATX boards we've reviewed, but retains everything we like about the chipset for use in a media centre, including the HDMI output. There's also a standard VGA output, so you can run two monitors without having to buy a dedicated graphics card.
If you want to upgrade to a full graphics card, there's a PCI-E x16 slot for this job. There's plenty of room for other expansion cards, though, with four PCI-E x1, one PCI-E x4 and two PCI expansion slots. The PCI-E x4 slot can also be used for a second full-size graphics card (part of the graphics card's connector will remain unconnected) and let you run in CrossFire mode. This may sound like it would be slow, but Asus's P5K Deluxe/WiFi-AP (reviewed opposite) has a second PCI-E x16 slot that only runs at x4 speed.
There's plenty of room for storage on the GA-MA69G-S3H, with four SATA2 ports that can be used in a RAID configuration. Four USB2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire ensure that connecting to external devices is no problem, either.
If you're looking to build a budget PC or a media centre in a case that will take an ATX motherboard, the GA-MA69G-S3H is a good choice with plenty of expansion options. If you don't need all the slots and ports, though, MSI's K9AGM2 is a better choice.
System Specifications
AMD 690G chipset, supports AMD Socket AM2 processors, two PCI, one PCI-E x16, one PCI-E x4, three PCI-E x1, four DIMM slots, four USB2, FireWire, HDMI, D-sub
Author: David Ludlow
Computer Shopper Online