If you're looking for a mainboard to build a low cost PC, having an all-onboard solution is the best choice, and if we talk about that, choosing one with the AMD 790G chipset is the only thing to do, but what if your budget is very low? Well, in that case, you can easily go with the previous chipset from AMD, the 690G, and today I will tell you a few things about the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, a motherboard that proved to be one of the best ones using the 690G.


The Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H is a mATX board, so it's going to fit well inside smaller cases, but its layout is not brilliant at all. Why? Because the PCI Express x16 slot is located below the PCI Express x1 one, and if you want to add a video card, the 2 PCI slots may become unusable (or you may risk to fry your new video card, because the lack of space for proper cooling), as you can see in the image above.

This mainboard can work with Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core / Athlon 64 / Sempron processors, and the Integrated ATI Radeon X1250-based graphics chip can handle old games pretty well, and even some of the new ones at low settings and resolution, but that's not why would you build a system using this board.

Realtek is the producer that took care of the networking and audio of this board, which incorporates the ALC889A Audio Codec and RTL8110 Gigabit Ethernet. I got them on my MSI board, and I must confess both work above my expectations, especially the onboard sound!

The maximum amount of memory that can be installed on the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H is an insane 16GB! Obviously, dual channel is supported, and you can install anything from DDR2 400 up to DDR2 800 (obviously, DDR2 1066 may also work, but don't bet on clocking it that high!).

While the board has 4 SATA2 connectors, there's only one IDE connector available, so you'd better move on to SATA devices.

At last, here's what can be found on the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, when talking about connectivity with external devices: 1x PS/2 keyboard port, 1x PS/2 mouse port, 1x D-Sub port, 1x DVI-D port, 1x HDMI port, 1x Optical SPDIF Out port, 1x IEEE 1394a port, 4x USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 1x RJ-45 LAN port, and 6x Audio jacks, with 6x USB2.0 aditionals and 2 IEEE 1394a connectors.

Oh, one more thing - if the above is not enough, look at what others say about the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, namely those at TestFreaks.

AMD’s current quad-cores aren’t much to brag about, unless we think of their price. But AMD knows it has to remain competitive on the performance side as well, and so it makes haste for the 45nm CPUs. Not that we’d actually see any 45nm CPU from AMD until Q4 this year.

At least we now officially know that Deneb, the desktop quad-core variant of the Shanghai 45nm CPU, can easily hit 3.2 GHz and go beyond that. Although Deneb can’t be rushed to match Shanghai’s launch, AMD fans can rest assured that the 45nm desktop CPU is worth waiting for a bit more.

Deneb will be the direct competitor for Intel’s Nehalem CPU, which is supposed to be clocked at 3.0 GHz, so the AMD processor with its 3.2 GHz still has a fighting chance as long as performance is the name of the game. It could be that Nehalem might win the race again, hopefully only by a small margin, while AMD’s solution will be more price-competitive.

AMD announced that Deneb samples will be out as soon as Q3, but the CPU will be ready for a commercial launch sometime in Q4 . No problem, we’ll wait on it patiently as we overclock our R700-based video cards like crazy.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we have to celebrate. Well, not all of us, because those guys at Western Digital or other big HDD manufacturers don't have anything to celebrate. In fact, all those into this industry should bow their heads and kneel before Seagate, the first hard drive manufacturer to hit the 1 billion shipped units mark!


In 29 years, Seagate managed to sell about 79,000,000 TB of storage space, enough to keep almost 160 billion hours of video content or 1.2 trillion hours of music compressed in the MP3 format. The countdown started with the ST506 drive, pictured above, with 5MB of storage, and now their largest drives have no less than 1TB of space!

According to Bill Watkins, Seagate's CEO, "This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world. Al Shugart and a few others started the company behind a convenience store in 1979 and enabled the birth of the first PCs. Today we’re at the center of the digital content revolution. So reaching this milestone is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our accomplishments and those of our predecessors, and to also look forward to the great things we can still achieve as a company."

Need I say more? 1 Billion!!!

For those that would like to see AMD out of business, here's some news - if you didn't figure it out already, because of them Intel doesn't send its prices sky high! In fact, although they may have lost the performance crown, AMD's aggressive pricing policy is helping all those Intel buyers get cheaper processors. Anyway, I don't want to start a war between Intel and AMD fans again. The good news today is about Intel's prices, so let's see the numbers, shall we?


Intel announced price cuts for 14 different processors currently in its portfolio, but the Q6700, Q6600, E6850 and E4600 went down the most, some even as low as 50 percent! Is this insane, or what?

Just check the following - Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz) went down 50 percent, from $530 to $266; same thing goes for the quad-core Xeon X3230 (2.66GHz) - from $530 to $266; the Celeron 430 (1.8GHz) - a 23 percent from $44 to $34, and the dual-core Celeron E1200 (1.6GHz), falling 19 percent from $53 to $43.

Considering the above, I guess AMD is soon going to give away processors, maybe even pay us to take them, and Intel will follow close behind! Anyway, big thanks should go to both companies for making such small prices possible. Thank you, Intel, for lowering prices, and thank you very much, AMD, for forcing them to do so!

You certainly remember the Raptor HDD series from Western Digital, as they are still some of the fastest SATA drives on the market. A couple of years ago, SDDs appeared out of nowhere and somehow ruined WD’s and Seagate’s future plans (not that they were planning to come up with a sort of successor for the HDD format of their own).

So, if you need to have the fastest storage drives, you either choose the Raptor or whatever SDD you can get your hands on. Oh wait, those still cost a fortune… well, looks like you’re stuck with 7,200 RPM HDDs. Hm? What? WD has some new cheap Raptor variant?

The direct heir of the Raptor family is dubbed the Velociraptor, supposedly priced at around $300. It supports the 3GB/s SATA standard, has a capacity of 300GB, 16 MB cache and spins your data at 10,000 RPM, just like the previous Raptor. The new drive actually comes in a 2.5" size factor, but has a massive "Icepack" heatsink that makes it large enough to fit in a 3.5" bay.

Preliminary tests made by Maximum PC proved that Velociraptor is faster than the older Raptor or any other HDD in any
possible way. However, Maximum PC also tested it against a $1,950 Mtron Pro-series 64-gigabyte SSD and found out that WD’s little wonder can’t really compete with the SDD pack.

But hey, it’s only 300 bucks…. it doesn’t get more cost-effective than this. Come to think of it, it’s a 2.5” HDD so maybe you can rip that heatsink off and squeeze it into your laptop.