The GA-MA790FX-DS5 motherboard is powered by the AMD 790FX/SB600 chipset, and supports all AM2+ and AM2 Phenom, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64, and Sempron processors. This is a standard ATX motherboard, measuring 30.5cm x 24.4cm, with no board overhang. Memory support comes from 4 x 1.8V DDR2 DIMM sockets, which can handle up to 16GB of system memory, and at up to DDR2-1066 speeds. Standard DDR2-667/800 is also supported, and the board offers dual channel options in both ganged and unganged configurations. It can even take ECC memory, assuming your CPU supports that technology.

For the budget-minded consumer, the ECS GF8200A is a pretty good deal. For $70 USD, the board has the features to build a good gaming PC or a HTPC with the integrated graphics with the caveat that there is no digital audio output and DVI port. The benefit of having DirectX 10 integrated graphics include: PureVideo HD playback of Blu-Ray discs and the ability to use the Aero UI in Windows Vista. GeForce Boost is an interesting concept but with it working only on the 8400/8500 cards is limited in usefulness to most people as they might be better served buying a 9600GT and using the integrated graphics in an emergency. Hybrid SLI shows performance increases in most of the tests but in others it shows the same performance as the 8500GT by itself.