[H]ard|OCP reviews GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H AMD 690G based motherboard
GIGABYTE is well known throughout the world's computer industry, with a proven track record for high performance and stable products. Gigabyte has surprised a lot of enthusiasts over the last year or so in that they have started to produce a truly great line of stable and highly overclockable motherboards in the Intel Core 2 Duo arena. Today we see them focus on another market entirely, but hope to see the same quality traits shine through. With their emerging popularity of enthusiast products, GIGABYTE has worked hard to change their product design focus in order to produce some of the best overclocking gear around. Their latest AM2 based motherboard exemplifies this trend very well.
The GA-MA69GM-S2H is among GIGABYTE newest offerings for the AMD based AM2 processors. The board uses the latest in AMD chipset design, the AMD 690G Northbridge chipset paired with the AMD SB600 Southbridge chipset. The AMD based chipsets support the following technologies: Athlon64 socket AM2 type processors, DDR2 style DRAM modules operating in Dual Channel mode at speeds up to 800MHz; and single card PCI Express based x16 graphics cards. The board itself is feature complete, only needing an Athlon64 AM2 style processor, DDR2 memory, drives, and a PSU for a fully operational system. The following components have been integrated in to the GA-MA69GM-S2H's design: 1 ATA-133 IDE port and 4 SATA II ports (SATA only RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 capable) on the AMD SB600 controller; 10 USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 3 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each); 3 IEEE 1394 capable ports (1 in rear panel, and 2 onboard headers); a Realtek GigE Ethernet port in the rear panel; Realtek 8-channel HD audio codec featuring an S/PDIF optical output port; an integrated ATI Radeon x1250 graphics controller with VGA, DVI, and HDMI ports in the rear panel ; and PS/2 keyboard and mouse port support in the rear panel...
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