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Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H AMD Motherboard
Introduction
AMD's 690 chipset doesn't stop turning heads. The way it was introduced, as a low-priced alternative to Intel, with budget trim and no enthusiast options, belittled its raucous performance. It looked like a stopgap, especially since AMD had little to do with its design and released it as a last foray before the new AMD could re-group. It's not likely that even ATI expected the chipset to be the thin edge of the wedge. 690's ripples keep on growing. As it turns out, people seem to like motherboards with complete multimedia support, great onboard graphics, insignificant power envelopes, unparalleled performance, and low prices. Gigabyte's GA-MA69GM-S2H is the best example of a 690G motherboard to-date. This motherboard is going to win an Editor's Choice award. And that's a tough one to get. Everything has to work just right: The device needs to be designed and constructed well, with options that defy predictions, the best layout, and the vaulted ability to please everyone, even enthusiasts. No, there's no way one component will make everyone happy. First of all, this is a micro-ATX motherboard, limited by its meager room for expansion. It only has one PCI-Express slot, so CrossFire is out, and... well, that's about it. Gigabyte has produced an excellent motherboard, and the only sign of budget binning is the price.   Board Layout Because this is a small motherboard, Gigabyte decided that some things had to go. What's missing: more than one video card slot and a lot of legacy connectivity. There's still a floppy connector, which is on the front edge of the board and not crammed at the bottom, which is nice. Next to it is the IDE connector, which (granted) supports two devices. At the back there're PS/2 keyboard and mouse connections, but no LPT1 printer connector. What the motherboard does have is one of every possible kind of video-out connection. There's VGA, DVI-D (it doesn't support VGA/D-sub using an adapter), HDMI, and, on a separate expansion-slot-adapter, component and S-video. The audio-out isn't missing anything, and fully supports eight-channel HD (ALC889A, 106dB S:N) audio via 3.5mm jack, as well as optical S/PDIF. It's as if Gigabyte expected people to use this in their home-theater PCs.   The four (3Gb/s, single, RAID 0, 1, 10) SATA connections are just south of the parallel connectors, and are angled at 90 degrees (although they would still clear the PCI-Express slot for single-slot video cards). It's just a nice touch. The north and south bridge chipset heatsinks are also easy to clear, something that many other motherboards can't claim. They are only a hair taller than the PCI-Express slots, and leave a millimeter or two for any card above them. The short north bridge heatsink also makes it compatible with virtually any AM2 heatsink. The choice to go, from top to bottom, with PCI-Express x4, PCI-Express x16, PCI, and PCI for the expansion slots is very well-thought-out, although if the designers had swapped the last PCI and the x4 slot, a handful of people would have been able to run CrossFire in their micro-ATX PCs. Oh well. The main power and CPU auxiliary power connections are both toward the front and top (respectively) edges of the motherboard, while the USB and FireWire headers are at the bottom edge. Keeping the four USB connections on the back panel is one FireWire/IEEE1394 connection and one RJ-45 gigabit Ethernet connection.    The biggest hitch is the use of electrolytic capacitors. Unlike "Ultra-Durable" Gigabyte products, this motherboard has quite a few not-solid-aluminum caps, the tallest of which are all near the CPU socket; and, though they're far enough away, it seems out of place that Gigabyte made the chipset heatsinks short but left tall capacitors nearby. Bundle Pleasantly, Gigabyte thought well enough of their users to include a real manual with their motherboard. With the options and features available it's necessary, albeit unexpected. There are two driver disks: one for XP, and one for Vista. Each uses an excellent automatic driver installer called Xpress Installer, which, aside from the fact that you have to tell it not to install the Yahoo! Toolbar, makes the process of setting up the right drivers effortless. Gigabyte also includes a few of their utilities, most of which are super-useful. @BIOS updates the motherboard's BIOS from Windows by grabbing up-to-date BIOS information from Gigabyte's servers, without ever touching a floppy. This is doubly important as the motherboard didn't ship with the most current BIOS and it benefited greatly from its tweaks, particularly concerning the onboard video's hardware video acceleration. In case it fails, there is a repair utility (Xpress BIOS Rescue). Then there's Xpress Recovery2, which lets users make their own backups and supports both hard disk drives as well as optical drives. Download Center uses Internet Explorer to update the system drivers without having to hunt them down separately. EasyTune only allows you to look at your settings with this particular motherboard, and doesn't let you change them. Adding to the component/S-Video expansion slot adapter is a floppy cable, an IDE cable, and a handful of tough clip-into-place SATA cables. 
Page 1: Introduction, Board Layout & Bundle
Page 2: System Configuration & Benchmarks Page 3: Overclocking & Conclusion 
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