Craig Simms takes a big look at a small board.
Micro-ATX boards are all the rage for media centres these days (unless you’re one of those that likes to shoehorn a mini-ITX board into, well, a shoe), and if you’re interested in building a box for watching what’s on the box, you may appreciate the HDMI/component riser card featured on ASUS’ new board, based on AMD’s new 690G chipset.The onboard graphics are driven by the Radeon Xpress 1250 – so not flash by any standard (it doesn’t even support Shader Model 3.0, for example and is a true dinosaur), but certainly fine from a media centre point of view. If you’re worried about this you can quite easily throw in an updated card, although you’ll lose the HDMI port as a result of employing the PCI-E x16 slot. Other standouts of the board are four DIMM slots, a DVI port and S/PDIF passthrough for the HDMI. For the legacy users, parallel and serial ports are there, meaning it’s well positioned as an upgrade board too.ATI’s SB600 chipset means you have access to RAID on the board as well, just in case you’re trying to build the ultimate storage and media centre device. Those into building their own arcade machines may find this a suitable base as well.BIOS options as expected aren’t massively expansive, with voltages in particular lacking flexibility. Using an FX-62 with the multiplier clocked down to 6x, we couldn’t set the FSB any higher than 230MHz without the board locking up, although Windows was perfectly stable at this speed. Something for a BIOS revision to fix in the future perhaps.Once again this really isn’t a problem considering the board’s target market, and the price is incredible when you consider what it includes. Considering AMD’s massive price cuts of late, you can get a pretty darn powerful CPU in there as well.ASUS + AMD = Win.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009