A Closer Look At The Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H : System Builder Marathon (Media PCs): Day 2

A Closer Look At The Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H

By Ed Tittel, published on May 17, 2007
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: system, builder, marathon

Contents

7. A Closer Look At The Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H
8. How And What We Tested
9. PCMark05
10. The HQV Benchmark
11. The A/V Experience

7. A Closer Look At The Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H

Just as we finished our last story on HDMI PCs, Gigabyte sent us this HDMI motherboard, a full-size ATX item that retails for about $100. It's still pretty astounding how much capability $100 buys today, as compared even to just one year ago.

Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H
Northbridge	AMD 690G
Southbridge	ATI SB600
Voltage Regulator	Six Phases
BIOS	AMI 0502 (04/03/2007)
200 MHz (FSB800)	200.0MHz (+0.0%)
Connectors and Interfaces
Onboard	1x PCIe x16 1x PCIe x4 1x PCIe x1 2x PCI 3x USB 2.0 (2 ports per connector) 1x Floppy 1x Ultra ATA 4x Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s 1x Front Panel Audio 1x S/P-DIF In/Out 1x CD Audio In 2x IEEE-1394 FireWire 1x Fan 4 pins (CPU) 1x Fan 3 pins (Pwr) 1x Clear CMOS Jumper
IO panel	2x PS2 (keyboard + mouse) 1x RJ-45 Network 4x USB 2.0 1x DVI-D 1x VGA Out 6x Analog Audio (5.1 Channel, Mic-In, Line-In) 1x D25 Serial port 1x HDMI port 1x Optical S/P-DIF Out
Mass Storage Controllers
ATI SB600	4x SATA 3.0Gb/s (RAID 0,1,10) 1x Ultra ATA-133 (2-drives)
Network
GB PCIe LAN controller	AMD 690 chipset with Realtek RTL8110 PHY
Audio
HDA Controller Interface	AMD 690 chipset with Realtek ALC888 5.1 Codec
FireWire
TI TSB43AB23	2x IEEE-1394a (400 Mb/s)
Graphics
AMD 690G	ATI Radeon X1250 graphics Dual VGA output: DVI-D + VGA HDMI, DVI-D with max resolution to 2560x1600 RGG with max resolution to 2048x1536
Memory
Dual channel 4x 240-pin DIMM	Up to 8 GB of unbuffered 800/667/533 DDR2

As with many other Gigabyte motherboards, entering Ctrl-F1 in the main BIOS window adds more settings to the Advanced Chipset and the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (MIT) settings. You can alter CPU multipliers and steps, change memory timings on a per-setting basis and tweak all kinds of voltage settings as well. Some caution is probably warranted when messing around here, but the Gigabyte boards are pretty good at returning to defaults if you overstep the bounds of common sense and decency.

AMD System Hardware
Socket AM2 Processor	6000+ Athlon 64 X2 AM2 processor (3.0 GHz, 90 nm, 2 MB L2 cache)
RAM	Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8500C5D 2x 1024 MB DDR2-1066 (CL 5.0-5-5-15)
Hard Drives	2x Samsung Spinpoint SP2004C, Firmware xxx, 200 GB, 7,200 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/300
Graphics	eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB
System Software & Drivers
OS	Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition 2005 Build 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2
DirectX Version	9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Platform Drivers	NVIDIA Platform: nForce 9.53 Forceware 158.22
Graphics Driver	6.14.11.5822