GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H AM2 AMD 690G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: HDMI, DVI, and VGA, all in a small package. LOTS of headers on the board (USB/1394/Azalia). A PCIe x4 slot instead of a x1 slot (see cons though). Lots of BIOS options, including overclocking, with the one exception of voltage control (which really kills the OC ability).

Cons: I like this board overall, but there are a few things that really annoy me. First of all, the north bridge gets hot...REALLY hot. So hot, you can't keep your finger on it for long. I wish Gigabyte would have used a heat pipe design for NB cooling instead, which would have allowed them to keep the NB where it is w/o sacrificing the x4 slot. Another thing to watch is the fact that this only takes 1.8v RAM, so be careful with what you buy (I went with 4x1GB G.Skill). Oh, and the HDMI and DVI-D outputs cannot be used at the same time (same deal with two analog outputs-see manual). The other thing that really bothers me is that this board doesn't come with the S/PDIF I/O bracket. Gigabyte has the model # on their site, but as far as I can tell you can't order it anywhere (except wholesale). Maybe this board is just too new, and it'll be more available in a few weeks/months. Lastly, the sideways SATA ports are a bit of a pain, I would have preferred the more common vertical headers.

Overall Review: This board has a lot to love. 690G chipset, PCIe x4 in addition to its PCIe x16, and more A/V and digital ports than you'll probably ever need (10 USB ports!). However, the few drawbacks I mentioned in the cons costs this an egg. More than anything, I'm concerned about the NB temp...it runs really hot when idle, and only gets worse when gaming. I'd worry about it even more if I had a PCIe card sitting over it, but I can sacrifice the slot to put in a custom cooler (which I plan on doing soon). Integrated GPUs just generate too much heat for that passive heatsink cooling.

Pros: Works well, ubuntu recognized all the onboard devices out of the box.

Cons: This board disables the AMD CPU's hardware virtualization feature. None of the gigabyte documentation I have found reflects this, however, after contacting support I was informed there was no way to turn this feature on. This is a problem because I cannot run fully virtualized machines under Xen.

Overall Review: Documentation or marketing material should reflect that the board disables certain CPU features.