Introduction

It has now been nearly 12 months on since ATI and AMD made the big move to become one company and so far things have not been as rosy as AMD would have liked. AMD has not been able to come up with a new processor technology to combat Core 2, and it is only just recently that the Radeon HD 2900 series came out; nearly 4 months after nVidia released its DirectX 10 part. One thing we will not deny is that the addition of the ATI chipset business to AMD is a definite bonus.

In the past AMD had to rely on their third party vendors to support processors. When Athlon first made its appearance on the market, AMD has a hard time getting sales simply because there was only one single chipset available for it, and that was AMD's own 750 Irongate chipset, which was not very fast and plagued with compatibility problems. It was not till VIA finally had its KX133 chipset available did things pick up. Even when Athlon 64 started, chipset support was limited.

With the purchase of ATI, chipsets can be ready for their new architectures at the time of release, and being ATI based chipset, it is a proper solution, not a quickly slap it together type of product.

The first chipset to come out under the AMD brand is the 690G series which we first looked at though ECS. This chipset is designed to be a value product for AMD and its Athlon processors.

Today we have a new motherboard from MSI based on the new AMD 690G chipset series with support for HDMI which makes it perfect for the Home Theatre PC users out there. Let us today have a look at the MSI K9AGM2 and see exactly what it has to offer.