This board is one of those products that can either really be a beneficial item in your build or leave you wanting a bit more. I say this because if the motherboard is to be used in a Media Center or Home Theatre PC it is an outstanding product that is well worth looking into and is priced reasonably as well. It is small, has HDMI output for High-Def viewing, decent sound and embedded graphics for those who only game in a little way. The onboard graphics are really more for clear text than high end gaming in any case and it shares a bit of your onboard memory to boot. Games like C&C TW and Warcraft play just fine using the onboard graphics with at least 256Mb dedicated to the onboard ATI Graphics. Games like Half Life2 and Oblivion chug at an annoying rate at 1920X1080 resolutions and would not be a viable solution for most modern FPS games.
As far as being a gamer oriented product the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H is mildly in that category, but no CrossFire support puts it in the low spectrum and onboard DX9 only graphics are considered in the same fashion. The low price of the board does make it an affordable purchase and if you need a product that supports the latest AMD CPUs, and works well, this is a solid motherboard that performed without error. Every motherboard is aimed at a certain target audience, this board is made for a Media Center PC and for that arena it gets a Hot Product Award. The only real issue I had with the motherboard is that the NB passive heatsink gets extremely hot and I am speaking to Gigabyte engineers in the next few days to add a active cooler to the board. If that is addressed, this will be a great fix and make the board even better. You don't want your Media machine taking a dive due to heat and taking a chance of losing all your saved data. Overall Gigabyte did a good job here though and anyone can always just add a fan to the NB if they so wish.
Pros
- Small FF board, Excellent choice for a Media Center PC, it is low cost, has good options and is very available.
Cons
- Extremely hot NB I suggest ditching the passive heatsink, ATI 2900s or NVIDIA 8800s make the PCI slots unusable as they cover the slots.
