Power Consumption and Conclusions
The power consumption of the Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H is on par with those previous AMD 690 motherboard options, and that just makes sense. This chipset and IGP solution has been proving to be worthy of the power conscious crowd by providing outstanding performance and keeping power, heat and noise to a minimum.
Conclusions
We have several key points to address in our conclusions, most of which stem from the proposed changes that AMD has claimed on their AMD 690G chipset.
Performance
The overall performance of the Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H wasn’t dramatically different than that of the previous AMD 690 motherboards at stock speeds. Even though AMD might have claimed to make some tweaks in the memory controller in the updated BIOS, it wasn’t brought to the surface in any of our testing in such a way for us to take notice. Oh well, that still leaves the AMD 690 chipset as the best option for a low power, low cost IGP solution for the AMD’s AM2 platforms.
The benchmarks did show that Gigabyte’s MA69GM-S2H was more than capable of holding its own and the scores in general are about as fast as the more expensive desktop chipsets that are available for AMD’s processors. Users won’t likely be able to tell a speed difference between the MA69GM-S2H and say, a new NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI motherboard in a blind taste test.
The HD video playback was tested using a Pioneer Blu-ray drive and I can tell you that we did watch some 1080p movies that were encoded in H.264 and VC-1 and the experience was pretty good. Our CPU exceeds the minimum requirements that AMD described for HD playback, and I would always recommend going a little bit faster in your CPU purchase to give yourself a little more wiggle room.
Features
The Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H is a fantastic little motherboard with a surprisingly robust set of features. Besides offering Gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel analog and digital audio output and Firewire connections, the MA69GM-S2H has four total video output options. You can choose between VGA, DVI, component and HDMI connections — by far the best selection I have seen on a motherboard in-house.
The integrated graphics on the AMD 690 chipset is what makes it all happen, and though the gaming performance is less than appealing to most gamers, it should be enough to play the “Sims-like” titles that casual gamers tend to gravitate towards. Gigabyte did include a full sized x16 PCIe slot for upgrading to a discrete graphics card if you choose.
Finally, the BIOS updates to the AMD 690 chipset are superb and offer the most overclocking abilities of any mATX board to hit our test bench in quite some time. It probably won’t be breaking any speed records, but the options are there for you to push your AM2 processors over their stock speeds in order to increase overall performance, or to improve the GPU performance of the AMD 690 chipset. AMD thinks that by getting such a product out into the channel, Gigabyte’s MA69GM-S2H and other motherboards will find a niche market with users who want lower power consumption, IGP and a little overclocking on the side.
Pricing and Availability
All of this feature-filled, overclockable goodness can be found for a surprisingly low cost too: the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H can be found at Newegg.com for only $76. If you go with the Athlon X2 5200+ processor that I used in my testing to complete the pair, you’ll be looking at a price of around $130 bringing the total to just over $200. Add in some memory, hard drive, optical drive and case and you pretty much good done and have a nice HTPC box or budget system. Adding in HD-DVD or Blu-ray support will up the cost significantly, but the best priced option is no doubt the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive that is selling for $180 or so.
This kind of setup should be VERY appealing to a lot of users.
Final Thoughts
The Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H is definitely one of the best mATX motherboard options we have seen in a long time. It combines the performance of AMD’s AM2 processors, a decent on-board graphics solution courtesy of the AMD 690G chipset, four different video output options and overclocking abilities exceeding any other board around its $76 price point.
If you have any questions, comments or want to see what others are saying about this motherboard, head into our Gigabyte forum to discuss!!!
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