ASUS M2A-VM HDMI 690G Motherboard

Based on AMD's 690G chipset, the M2A-VM HDMI motherboard supports all current socket AM2 processors from the Sempron up through the Athlon FX series.  This particular model comes with four DIMM slots supporting up to 8GB of DDR2 memory at a peak of 800MHz.  There are two standard PCI slots as well as one PCI Express x1 and one PCI Express x16 slot.  Since this board utilizes a riser card for several video and audio features, we should subtract one PCI slot because you can't use it when the included riser is installed.

The integrated graphics are driven by a Radeon XPress X1250 that can use up to 256MB of system memory. The board provides both a DVI-I and VGA port on the back panel while HDMI is offered using the riser card included.  The maximum supported resolution for DVI-I is 2560x1600 while the VGA output peaks at 2048x1536.  Both TV-Out and HDMI max out at a resolution of 1920x1080 with TV-Out being interlaced and HDMI progressive scan.  The board also supports dual video mode between DVI, VGA and HDMI in any combination thereof.

Storage options cover both IDE and SATA solutions.  There are four SATA ports that support up to 3GB/s and can be configured in RAID 0, 1 and 10.  There is also a single IDE port spec'd at UDMA 133.  The board is equipped with a single Gigabit LAN connection as well as 6 channel audio powered by an ALC883 HD CODEC.  We should note that SPDIF support requires the use of the riser card included in the package as well.

The board supports up to 10 USB ports, with four at the rear and six powered by headers on the mainboard.  The board also offers two FireWire ports, one on the rear console and the other via a header.  Unfortunately, ASUS did not included any additional hardware to utilize these headers right out of the box.