The feature rich GA3-C board from Gigabyte, based on the Nvidia Nforce Professional 3600 MCP system chipset, was set up with 4GB of DDR2-800 registered ECC server memory, one for each of the four channels, as well as a Sapphire ATI HD4870 2GB graphics card fitting the only available PCI-e slot. The usual dual Gigabit Ethernet, SATA plus SAS storage interfaces, as well as Gigabyte's integrated server management circuitry complete the feature set.

MSI's X610 is an interesting concept. It uses a 15.6" LCD/chassis, and the fact that it's very thin and weighs just over 4.5 pounds is definitely a nod to the MacBook Air. Also like the MacBook Air, the X610 forgoes the inclusion of an optical drive. Or perhaps the lack of an optical drive is more like a netbook, and the X610 certainly has similarities to netbooks, at least when it comes to CPU performance. Unlike most netbooks, MSI chooses to use an AMD processor, and while that would normally mean substantially more performance than an Intel Atom CPU, the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 isn't going to set any speed records. Using a 65nm process, the Neo MV-40 is a single-core 1.6 GHz part, rather like the original Athlon 64 only using updated process technology.

So what we have is a relatively large chassis that's very thin, no optical drive, and a CPU that aims to be "fast enough". If you couple that with a reasonable integrated graphics approach, you should be able to get good battery life without compromising on weight or size. Except, MSI decided not to use an IGP solution and instead includes ATI's Radeon Mobility HD 4330. The discrete graphics solution isn't super fast, but it's definitely a lot faster than any current IGP and it provides all the necessary features to support high definition video decoding.

After all these motherboards reviewed we should select the best one or two, but this proved to be daunting task. First of all, some motherboard models don’t have integrated graphics cards, so it makes hard to determine price/performance ratio. We decided that integrated graphics cards have impact on final price tag and we picked those that offer best price/performance ratio.

So far we have already tested X58, P55, 790GX and 785G boards from this company and all have been mighty impressive. Each board has been for a specific segment; X58 for Intel Extreme, P55 for Intel Mainstream, 790GX for high-end AMD and 785G for AMD Mainstream and there are no shortage of models either with two or more boards under each chipset.

The ASRock M3A790GXH/128M motherboard for AMD Socket AM3 processors and DDR3 memory modules is equipped with the AMD 790GX chipset, offers an enormously high performance and can be very high overclocked. The DirectX 10 capable onBoard HD 3300 graphics unit is amazing fast like the previous AMD 790GX ASRock DDR2 motherboard and achieved the so far the highest benchmark values of the integrated graphics processor solutions.