µATX Overview: Prelude to a Roundup

Enter the Mobo

Last but certainly not least is our selection of motherboards that will be part of our µATX roundup. We looked at several different ways of presenting the information and determined that we will separate each roundup article by chipset manufacturer. As an example, all of the NVIDIA chipset boards will be compared against each other and then we will move to the AMD 690G chipsets and then finally the Intel chipset based boards. We will have a separate chipset and budget CPU comparison article shortly that focuses on the pure performance of the chipsets with various CPUs. We will go into additional details in each roundup article but for now here are the motherboards we have spent more time with than our families over the past few months.

AMD 690G
Jetway M2A692-GHG
ASUS M2A-VM HDMI
MSI K9AGM2-FIH
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
Biostar TA690G
Sapphire Pure Innovation PI-AM2RS690M

NVIDIA 7050
Biostar TForce TF7050-M2
ASRock AliveNF7G-HD
Abit AN-M2HD

NVIDIA 6100/6150
abit NF-M2 nView
ASUS M2NPV-VM
DFI C51PV-M2/G Infinity
ASRock AliveNF6G-VSTA

Intel ATI Radeon Express 1250
abit Fatal1ty F-I90HD
ASRock 4Core1333-FullHD

Intel G965
Intel BLKDG965OTMKR
Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2
ASUS P5B-VM

Intel G33
MSI G33M-FI
Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R
ASUS P5K-VM
Intel DG33TLM

There you have it, approximately 22 boards are planned to be covered utilizing seven different IGP chipsets. Our primary focus (Ed: That got lost somewhere on page 2, didn't it?) in this roundup will be on the features and reliability of each motherboard, but we will also look at performance on an individual basis. We will then perform a platform comparison that will not only compare the performance of our top µATX selections against each other in our individual categories (HTPC, Gaming, Home/Office) but also against platforms based on the more expensive and/or larger ATX cousins. Scattered in between each roundup article will be our side-bar coverage of various components utilized in our platform buildups. Over the course of the next couple of months we will also provide analysis and reviews of several components that caught our interest during the course of testing.

Oh, we almost forgot: we get to do this all over again with the P35 motherboards when we're done with the µATX segment. Where did we put the coffee maker?