Introduction

The last year the major focus on the PC industry in terms of the CPU war was all Intel. Since the Netburst Architecture was thrown by the way side in favour of the much improved Core architecture, AMD has hit the skids big time, while their CPU's are cheaper per clock speed, Intel has more speed per MHz compared to that of the AMD series.

While AMD may now be the less favoured for the high-end desktop, they are more than adequate for the HTPC and value desktop and with the acquisition of the ATI chipset and graphics division, AMD now has a lot more clout behind its CPU's, as it not longer has to rely entirely on companies like nVidia, SIS and VIA to produce its chipsets.

AMD has only one chipset currently on the market which is the 690G chipset with the 790X coming later this year. AMD's 690G chipset has really taken off as a budget chipset that has a mighty punch to it.

Compared to that of the GeForce 6150 chipset, AMD has really got a winner - its ability to run HDMI as well as superior graphics core makes it a more ideal chipset for the K8, giving you a full AMD system with AMD CPU and AMD chipset.

Today we are looking at the GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM motherboard designed with the AMD 690G chipset. So let us see how well it compares to the MSI based motherboard which we recently tested in our labs.