The Gigabyte Ga-MA69GM-S2H is a board that is targeted to the HTPC market. It has a rich feature set for a micro board, and will make a great board for its intended purpose. The addition of HDMI should make setup and use with your HTPC and plasma or LCD a piece of cake! The layout of the board was really quite good. In fact, I would say that it is hard to find an mATX board that is either not terribly crowded, or that has placed things correctly on the board; but Gigabyte did it. The layout is smart and makes for easy installation and placement of components and wires. The performance of the board is just absolutely outstanding. Gigabyte certainly has a winner in that catagory with the GA-MA69GM-S2H. This should make your HTPC setup just outstanding. The board easily handled everything that we through at it without even a whimper.

Today, we take a look at nVidia?s nForce4 x16 chipset that offers two PCI-E x16 slots to provide the maximum bandwidth to video cards running in SLI mode. However, is this really needed with the current generation of cards or, like SATA2, its simply an overkill? That?s precisely what we?ll find out today by using two 7800GTX cards in SLI mode on a standard nForce4 SLI motherboard as well as an nForce4 SLI x16 motherboard. Lets look at the testbed.

Q3 2005 turned the market upside down. Chipset shipments grew but there were some major shifts in market share. Nvidia dropped to 6 per cent with only 500,000 chipsets shipped, ATI grew to 36 per cent and managed to ship 3,100,000 chipsets. Via is the leader with 42 per cent of market and 3,600,000 chipsets while plucky little SIS stayed at 14 per cent of the market but shipped 1, 200, 000 chipsets. The other vendors captured two per cent of market with 200 000 chipsets sold. In Q3 2005.

NVIDIA has re-entered the IGP scene with the launch of their latest AMD chipset family, the GeForce 6100 and nForce 400, bringing for the first time DX9/SM3.0 graphics, PureVideo HD acceleration as well as all the usual nForce4 goodies to the integrated market.