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.