If you're in the market for an affordable computer, say for standard office applications at work, there is no reason to spend more than $500. If you shop carefully, and pick components like the Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H which has an integrated AMD Radeon X1250 videocard, you can shave off the cost of that hardware from the total price.

In business, it's the accountant who run the world, so while the Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H regrettably falls short as a home theatre PC, it's affordability makes it a great all around budget platform. It's compact, cost efficient, and ready to be the foundation of an office-oriented workstation computer. The AMD 690G chipset is well known as a Home Theatre PC chipset... but in the course of this review we saw no HDMI port, and audio jacks are kept to 5.1 channel status. Not the best solution for a kick ass HTPC is it?

Office applications are generally run in 2D environments, and in these environments a fast paced GPU is typically unnecessary... a high end videocard won't influence benchmark results against a integrated chipset after all. Gaming is an entirely different story, and here the AMD 690G predictably falls short, as do all other integrated GPUs.

On the plus side, the AMD 690G chipset does supply Microsoft Windows Vista and all its eye candy, and that's a tangible benefit. The Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H board is fully featured, it fits office requirements for abundant storage options, a good quotient of USB jacks, has a parallel printer port, analog and DVI monitor outputs, the basic assortment of sound jacks, and a passively cooled chipset which generates no noise. The Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H has excellent price point, just $69 CDN ($69 US, £35 GBP). Accessories in the box are limited to the essentials.

In terms of performance the Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H performs well and kept up with the other AMD 690G models, though it did not stand out from the crowd. The AMD Athlon64 X2 processor is not quite as powerful as Intel's Core 2 Duo, but for multimedia tasks that doesn't make a huge difference. Overclocking was not the Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H's specialty, but that's okay. This motherboard is not designed to be an overclocking board. There were some decent BIOS options but realistically if you want to do a lot of tweaking spend more and get an overclocking motherboard. In gaming the onboard AMD Radeon Xpress 1250 videocard was clearly not up to the task by itself. A stand alone videocard remedied that as expected.

Given all this, you'd expect us to be a little underwhelmed by the A690GM2MA-RS2H. On the contrary, with its low price point the Foxconn A690GM2MA-RS2H could be a great option for building up any value-oriented office or home computer.

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