Reviews for GigaByte GA-MA69G-S3H Desktop Motherboard - AMD 690G Chipset - Socket AM2 PGA-940

Happy so far.

Strengths: Probably the best 690G AM2 Motherboard available. With the new A4 bios and entering Ctrl+F1 after entering bios screen you add a new advance menu for tweaking everything possible. Overclockers heaven!

Weakness: Only two fan headers, 1 for CPU and only 1 for a case fan. None for a PSU fan, come on Gigabyte! No gameport header for joysticks, you will need a USB joystick.

As I mentioned in the strengths section above. If you want to overclock and be able to set everything, the new bios has opened it all up and Gigabyte did not hold back with this Board. Got my AM2 Brisbane 3600+ to 4400+ speeds so far and plan to tweak it higher. Just make sure you get some good ram with ths Board because the last thing you want is to limit your overclocking. Then buy a cheap Brisbane 3600+ and crank it up!

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GAMA69GS3H Motherboard

Strengths: Socket AM2+ AM2 AMD Phenom AMD Athlon 64 FX AMD FX 64 X2 Dual-Core, Raid AMD 690G

Weakness: some bios do not support OC

I used the F5A Bios which had more overclocking features in voltage control.
The dram configuration has several tweaks but was unstable if I set up any other values than default. I tried several types of memory from 1.8v generic to 2.2v crucial with same results.

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Great for the money

Strengths: Affordable. Vista compatible. Onboard sound

Weakness: Outweighed by the strengths

This board is nicely priced for the budget minded people like myself. Works great with XP, since I didn't want to upgrade to vista yet. It is Vista compatible when I decide to upgrade down the road.

The onboard sound is an extreme plus with this board. The 7.1 channel sound is better in this board than most boards I've had. If you're an audiofile, then this board is for you.

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Great board

Strengths: Lots of features; see list. BIOS makes overclocking very easy. Comes with good utilities. Integrated ATI Radeon X1250 graphics is good for all but serious gaming.

Weakness: Linux drivers for ATI graphics chips has notoriously been weak, but since AMD took over ATI, they are working to improve this.

The only problem I've had with this board is, on bootup into Linux, it always gives the cryptic error message, "K8 NPT Data Change... Update New Data to DMI!" I've gone into BIOS and reset the DMI data, and the message still appears. Searching the web says that this is due to a bug in the board itself.

Also, many default BIOS settings needed changing if you wanted to use all the advanced features.

Note that while the integrated audio controller support HD-DVD and BluRay, that does not mean you can automatically play high definition content - processing the video is the real bottleneck there.

Like other boards, this board supports many old legacy interfaces--IDE (parallel ATA), PS/2, VGA (D-Sub), and PCI--as well as the new ones--Serial ATA, USB, HDMI, and PCI Express. This allows you to still use your old hardware (peripherals, add in cards, etc.) while you upgrade to newer components that use the modern, much-improved interfaces. If you don't need them, you can disable many of legacy interfaces in the BIOS and save resources. The board comes with a HDMI-to-DVI adapter in case your monitor doesn't support HDMI.

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Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H

TestSeek.com has collected 6 expert reviews for Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H and the average expert rating is 82 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use TestSeek.com to find all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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