On the rear I/O we find the Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard is a HDMI port which doubles up as the platforms's DVI jack when a short adaptor is inserted. HDMI allows you to connect the motherboard to a high definition display with one cable that carries both video and audio signals. The analog video jack is positioned just to the left, and with a Radeon X1250 built right in you can save money by not having to buy a full PCI Express videocard if you do most of your work in Windows alone. Such integrated graphics cards handle 2D office applications, but fair poorly with 3D games as a general rule of thumb.

The Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard is equipped with one PCI Express x16 slot for videocards, three PCI Express x1 slot for high bandwidth devices, one PCI Express x4 slot (which can accommodate a PCI Express x16 videocard running in X4 mode), and two PCI slots. At the bottom of the motherboard is a floppy drive connector, two IEEE 1394a and three USB2.0 headers. If you plan on running two videocards in CrossFire mode, don't forget to plug in those aux power connectors on each videocard.

The bottom right hand corner of the Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard has four 3.0GB/s Serial ATA II connectors (supporting RAID 0/1/10), three USB headers, two IEEE 1394a headers (in gray), the CMOS battery, the read Clear CMOS jumper and the front I/O panel connectors. The board has but one IDE connector, so use it for an optical drive.

The four DDR-2 slots will accommodate about 4GB of DDR2-800/667/533 RAM. Gigabyte's GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard will work with 20-pin main ATX cable power supplies, but older units are not designed to handle the power requirements of modern computers with multiple videocards, so do yourself a favour and upgrade to a PSU with a 24-pin cable.

On the Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard, the AMD 690G chipset is located right next to the socket AM2 AMD processor. There is enough space for quite large after market heatsinks to be installed here, so if you plan on building an HTPC look for a tower cooler with a nice quiet 120mm fan.