Introduction

Our upcoming series of µATX articles has traveled a long road (Ed: that's an understatement!). When we first envisioned a long-overdue look at the µATX form factor motherboards, we thought it would be your typical motherboard roundup with maybe a twist or two tossed in to keep it interesting. One thing led to another and before you knew it, our minds started to run rampant with additional items that we felt were important for the article. This led to scope creep and those of us who manage projects - or who have been unlucky enough to be on a project that has featuritis - know what happens next.

That's right, we over-emphasized the new article features to the detriment of our primary focus, providing a motherboard roundup that featured the often ignored but market leading µATX form factor. What started out with adding a couple of features such as IGP video quality comparisons and midrange CPU performance turned into a maze of thoughts and ideas that led us to believe it would be quite easy to add additional tests without affecting the overall schedule too much. We were wrong, but we hope that our future motherboard articles will be better for it.

How did we get stuck in the quagmire of µATX hell? It began with innocent thoughts of adding budget to midrange CPU coverage, low to midrange graphics comparisons against the IGP solutions, High Definition playback comparisons utilizing not one but each competing standard, Windows XP versus Vista versus Linux, onboard audio versus add-in cards, and even tests of input devices and external storage items. It ended with our project scope changing from being motherboard specific to platform encompassing.

We started down that path but despite periodic excitement, at times we also ended up with a dreaded case of paralysis by analysis syndrome. Don't get us wrong: we do not regret the effort that has been expended on this roundup; however, we sincerely regret the time it has taken to complete it and we apologize to those of you who have been waiting months for this information. It turns out that we ignored one of our favorite quotes from C. Gordon Bell, "The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there." That is one of the many factors that caused us problems, as it became quite obvious during testing that getting all of this equipment to work together and then benchmarking as planned was not exactly going to be a walk in the park.

We have been constantly waiting on that one BIOS or driver to fix a malady of problems that we've discovered along the way. The manufacturers would ask - sometimes plead - for us to retest or wait as "that problem is being solved and a fix should be available immediately". Immediately it turns means days and weeks, not hours. We also received several product revisions during the course of testing that required us to throw out the old results and start again. In the end, we hope our efforts paid off and at least we have the knowledge that every supplier has had ample opportunity to fix any ills with their product.

Our experiences with a wide variety of components will be discussed extensively in a series of articles to be published over the coming month. However, at the end of the day, the star of this show is still the motherboard. If the CPU is the brain of a computer and the video card is its eyes, then the motherboard is the central nervous system. It truly is the central focal point of the system and having one that works correctly makes it really easy to put a system together.

As such, we are changing our testing emphasis from being primarily performance based to a combination of performance, features, stability, support, and those intangibles that we experience during testing that might set one board apart from another. While performance is important, does a few tenths of second or an additional two frames per second in a benchmark really mean that much when you cannot get a USB port working due to a crappy BIOS release or your system does not properly recover from S3 sleep state when you are set to record the last episode of the Sopranos? We thought as much also, so we are changing our vantage point on motherboard testing.

While we are performance enthusiasts at heart, the fastest board available is not worth much if the included features do not work as advertised or the board constantly crashes when trying to use an application. Our testing emphasis, especially between boards based on the same chipset, will be focused on stability and compatibility with a wide range of peripherals in both stock and overclocked conditions. Speaking of features, we will place a renewed emphasis on networking, storage, memory, and audio performance. More importantly, we will provide additional analysis on overclocking, energy consumption, cooling capabilities, layout, and power management features where applicable.

We also want to take this opportunity to put the manufacturers on notice: we will not countenance delays, patches, and numerous updates again, particularly on products that are available in the retail market! If a lemon of a motherboard gets released to consumers and it needs more BIOS tuning or perhaps an entirely new revision, we are going to do our best to point this fact out to the readers. We understand that it can be difficult to get every single peripheral to work properly, especially with new devices coming out all the time, but when a motherboard fails to work properly with a large number of USB devices, memory types, GPUs, etc. that product shouldn't be on the market.

At the end of this journey we will provide three different platform recommendations based on the various components we have utilized in testing. Our platforms are designed around HTPC, Gaming, and Home/Office centric configurations with a heavy emphasis on the systems being quiet, reliable, and affordable. Okay, we blew the budget on the HTPC configuration but we will provide several alternatives to help control costs on that particular buildup. Let's find out what else is changing and exactly what will be included in our comprehensive review of the µATX motherboards and surrounding technologies.



Benchmarking, GPUs, and Displays

Our motherboard benchmarks are changing as standardized application test suites like BAPCO's SYSMark 2007 and PC WorldBench 6.0 will be utilized to provide results that look at video creation, E-learning, 3D modeling, and office productivity applications. We will continue to utilize our in-house video/audio/productivity application benchmarks where applicable. Specific application benchmarks for networking, USB, storage, and audio performance will be provided in our in-depth chipset review roundups; otherwise we will reference to these results in first looks or single board reviews.

We are in the midst of a great lull at this time with game benchmarks as the top titles for 2007 such as Crysis, UT3, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will not be shipping until the fourth quarter (or "when it's done"), so our current benchmarks will have to suffice until the holiday season. Finally, depending upon the situation we will include synthetic benchmarks such as SuperPI and Futuremark to outline performance differences between stock and overclocked configurations.

One of the most common requests we have received is to see how an integrated graphics chipset on the typical µATX (commonly referred to as microATX or mATX) platform compares to a more performance-oriented graphics chipset designed for mainstream configurations. We're not trying to turn our µATX roundup into a graphics card shootout, but we decided to look at solutions that range in price from $60 to $125 to see just what type of performance and feature improvements an extra week's paycheck could buy.

In keeping with our silence is golden theme, our graphics cards consist of the Gigabyte 8600GT, MSI NX8600GTS, and the Sapphire HD 2400XT. We might even have time to throw in video quality results with our recently arrived Galaxy 8600GTS HDMI card that features (if you couldn't figure it out) native HDMI output. For those of you who wondering why an AMD HD 2600 card is not included, the reason is simple: passively cooled cards were not available in time. We have now received the MSI RX2600XT and will include video comparisons with this card and potentially another HD 2600 card in our G35 preview next month.

Overall, our primary focus is to compare video playback quality between these add-in products sporting the latest AVIVO and PureVideo technologies and the latest IGP chipsets from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. We will briefly touch on the quality differences in the motherboard test results but will provide an in-depth sidebar article on video quality and gaming performance.

Of course, if you are going to show video card and IGP performance/quality comparisons then one would assume we used a monitor capable of displaying those 1080P capabilities. In fact, we used three different monitors for our test results. Our primary desktop monitors included the 24" Acer AL2416WBsd for DVI and analog output testing along with the 24" Westinghouse L2410NM for HDMI output testing. Our choice for the all-encompassing multifunction monitor in our HTPC buildup is the 42" Westinghouse TX-42F430S (which replaces the older 42" Westinghouse LVM-42w2) that will be reviewed separately in the coming weeks.



Mass Storage

Finding the right video source for our High Definition tests was a little more difficult than we anticipated. We thought of several titles that would be perfect for generating stunning video playback sequences, but each title was available in either HD-DVD or Blu-ray formats only. In the end, we chose a couple of titles that offered very good visuals but more importantly were available in SD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray formats. These two titles are Mission Impossible 3 and Swordfish. While we would love to show Halle Berry's special scene in Swordfish, we will instead focus on one of the colorful action scenes in the beginning of the movie. Mission Impossible 3 affords us a scene where Tom Cruise is scaling the wall at the Vatican, and that will separate the good from bad when it comes to moiré patterns in 1080P.

In order to display those movie sequences we need the latest HD software, so we naturally used CyberLink's PowerDVD Ultra and Corel's InterVideo WinDVD 8 Platinum HD/BD . Both programs gave us migraines under Vista up until the latest patches, and we are still a little on edge during scene switching and extended playback. Of course, this is almost standard fare with Vista, but we will cover these issues and others in a separate article. On a side note, we are also utilizing the HD HQV Benchmark to evaluate the picture quality output of our graphics solutions and Intel's Digital Home Capabilities Assessment 2.0 Tool to verify our platform's digital video capabilities and expected stability when playing back various video formats.

Having the software available for viewing and playback does little good if we do not have the proper optical drives that are up to the task. As an offshoot of this particular roundup we will start reviewing optical drives again at AnandTech in the near future. In the meantime, our HD capable test drives consisted of the Plextor PX-B900A , Toshiba SD-H802A , and Pioneer BDC-S02BK . Our standard DVD playback drive is the Lite-On LH-20A1P and we might even throw in a playback comparison between the Toshiba SD-H802A HD-DVD drive and the Microsoft Xbox 360 HD DVD Player. Unfortunately, we were hoping to receive the Toshiba SD-H903A HD-DVD writer to compare directly to the new low cost Pioneer BDC-S02BK Blu-ray writer but our sample has been delayed. However, we should receive it in time for the optical drive reviews.

While we are on the subject of storage, it turned out one of the most difficult choices we had to make was choosing what hard drive to utilize. In keeping with our silent and inexpensive theme we settled on the Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB for our standard test bed. That said, we wanted to try something a little different for our featured HTPC buildup and selected the Seagate DB35.3 750GB hard drive that is designed for DVR-specific challenges such as power consumption, video streaming performance, acoustics, and long term reliability. For those that like to throw caution to the wind, we also will be testing two of the Seagate DB35.3 500GB drives in RAID 0 and RAID 1 to see how well they perform against our standard Samsung T166 500GB in video specific testing. As if that's not enough, we also have the Seagate SV35.2 500GB drive engineered specifically for use in digital video surveillance systems. Not to be left out, Western Digital is trying their hardest to get us production level GreenPower hard drives for our home office platform buildup and Hitachi has promised a CinemaStar 7K1000 for our HTPC buildup. (Ed: Did we mention the Feature Creep yet?)



Audio/Visual Department

If we plan on having a large amounts of storage then it would be reasonable to expect us to have the capability to fill up those hard drives. One of the quickest ways to do this is to use your PC as a DVR device. The inability of our local cable company to actually get us a working OCUR (Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver) system meant we had to go old school in our search for reasonably priced digital TV tuner cards with QAM support. We settled on the FusionHDTV 5 Express, ATI TV Wonder 650, and the Hauppauge Win-HVR 1600 for our TV tuner duties. Our roundup will feature images captured with these cards along with a product overview in our HTPC buildup. We will follow up with an in-depth look at each card starting next month as we compare them to the new FusionHDTV6 Cool featuring reduced energy consumption and thermal output. Maybe by then, our cable company will have hopefully figured out the CableCARD setup - or at least quit drilling new holes on our walls.

If you are going capture, view, and play back HD video then it stands to reason that you want your audio solution to be capable of matching the video output. While we could have concentrated on gaming with the Creative lineup of X-Fi products, we decided to take a more logical approach in our comparison to the onboard audio solutions. All of our motherboards feature onboard audio solutions with Realtek being represented almost universally, but we tend to prefer the solutions from Analog Devices and IDT (SigmaTel) under Vista at this time. The onboard solutions in our roundup generally feature 6-channel or 8-channel output with most at least having the option of S/PDIF output via an optical or coaxial port.

Speaking of Vista, Microsoft changed all the rules with the new audio stack and we will spend additional time in a side-bar article going over the changes and looking at the performance of our various audio solutions. We had a surprising number of audio solution choices for our HTPC buildup and this is one area where Creative gets thoroughly thrashed in feature comparisons and capabilities. In the end we decided to concentrate our efforts on three cards that should cover our immediate needs for both our HTPC and Home/Office systems. We selected the ASUS Xonar D2, bgears b-enspire, and the Auzentech HDA X-Plosion 7.1 DTS Connect. We are still waiting on our Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sample and will compare that card against the Creative offerings later this year. Our motherboard roundup will feature scores from our onboard audio solutions and the ASUS Xonar D2 along with a complete features comparison and test results with our various speakers and A/V receiver.

We have always been fans of utilizing our home theater equipment to output our PC audio streams, but for many this type of setup is impractical. While we are not always excited about speaker technology designed exclusively for the PC audience, there are some really good solutions from Creative, Logitech, and Klipsch at the higher end of the market. For our roundup we were interested in using speakers that would properly convey the subtleties of our onboard or audio card outputs while being able to pull double duty with the A/V receiver. We use a Swans M-200 setup in our labs as the standard reference speaker configuration for most testing and have always been impressed with the quality of sound they generate. This also holds true for our 5.1 tests as we utilize the Swans M20-5.1.

Like most video and audio equipment, you typically get what you pay for and speakers are no exception, but there are a few surprises. We are not going to pretend we are experts on speaker technology nor are we capable of providing the type of reviews you can get at one of the dedicated A/V sites, but we will provide our subjective review of the audio equipment that will be utilized in our roundup. To that extent, we asked our good friends at The Audio Insider what they would recommend for our testing. They came back and suggested we purchase the Swans M10 for our base multimedia system and then they highly suggested the new Swans D1080 for our musical tastes while remaining on a budget. We also decided to go for the revised Swans M200MKII to shake up our test beds while utilizing an Acculine A2 setup for our 5.1 testing. We pulled out our trusty Onkyo TX-SR605 to handle the A/V receiver duties when testing the pass-through capabilities of our onboard audio solutions.



Of Mice, Keyboards, and Enclosures

Input devices are one of the more interesting aspects of our roundup as the sheer amount of mice and keyboards available makes it virtually impossible to test every combination. Also, the very subjective nature of testing these devices leads us to always offer the advice of "try before you buy". We decided our best course of action was to select a few of the top selling products and then test their capabilities under Vista. What we found was quite surprising as several of the products proved to us that "Vista Certified" can in fact mean "Vista Disaster".

As an example, for our HTPC platform choice we decided a Bluetooth capable mouse/keyboard combination would offer the best compromise for the sofa users. This led us to the Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 and Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5000 Laser Combo as our two choices, neither one being anything near inexpensive. What surprised us was the number of issues we had with the Logitech choice. Most of the issues centered on the Logitech having to use the Microsoft Bluetooth stack, but in our opinion there is no way this product should have received the Vista Certified label.

For our standard wireless combinations we selected the Logitech Cordless Desktop Comfort Laser, Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 3200 Laser, and the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 4000. Of course there are multitudes of different wireless keyboards and mice that can be combined together depending upon your likes or dislikes as a user. For simplicity we decided to go the package route - which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, as we will find out in our separate reviews.

Except for HTPC work, we really prefer the wired keyboards and mice with one of our favorite combinations being the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 or Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 paired with the Logitech MX-518 mouse. We like the MX-518 so much that most of our work desktops use it; it is just that good. As far as our gaming platform is concerned we will test the following keyboards: Razer Tarantula, Saitek Eclipse, and of course the Logitech G15. We will look at Creative's product lineup later on in the year. Our gaming mice consist of the Logitech G5, Razer DeathAdder, and the Razer Diamondback 3G. Unfortunately, we will have to wait a bit longer before the new Logitech G9 mouse arrives in the labs.

Power supplies are another area where the sheer number of choices and price ranges make it difficult to choose a product. Our thought process in choosing a power supply is to think about the power requirements of your current system and probably the next one or two systems you plan on building. Besides the monitor, the power supply is one of those items that can potentially last through a couple of system builds. We typically tailor our budget to afford the best possible power supply on the market at that time.

Considering our power requirements with the µATX platform are not going to be that great as CrossFire/SLI are out and typically the number of drives and peripherals will be limited by the small form factor, we believe something in the neighborhood of 380W to 480W should be acceptable for now and the near future. We also want a unit that is energy efficient and quiet so our logical choice is the SeaSonic S12 II 380W. We have not found a combination in our roundup testing yet that would cause us to seek a higher wattage unit. SeaSonic's own S12 II 430W would be the next logical choice but we felt like spending another $25 in this case was not worth it. There are numerous other choices that can made in this sector with Corsair, Enermax, SPI, FSP, and Antec all having good quality power supplies in this range.

We have just about covered the majority of components at this time which leads us to the final stretch. Knowing we are only utilizing the µATX form factor left us with several choices for cases and once again what is one man's garbage is another man's treasure in the hunt for case designs. We typically play it conservative so our choices reflect the decisions made - well almost. For our HTPC platform buildup we decided to break the budget and go with the Zalman HD160XT. Our gaming platform has two choices, the first being the Thermaltake LANBOX VF1000 for those who need a solid yet fairly inexpensive portable box. Our second choice and one that broke our budget again is the Silverstone SG03 SFF tower unit. We felt guilty about the additional credit card charges on our previous case choices so for our general desktop unit we went with the Ultra Products Micro Fly SX6 case with 600 Watt XVS-Series power supply. Our standard case during the motherboard testing phase was the Silverstone SG03 and we have to admit this is one of our favorite cases at the moment, regardless of form factor.



RAM, CPU, and OS

Our selection of memory was yet another difficult choice as the prices for high quality DDR2-800 memory is almost absurd at this time. We mean that in a good way as a year ago the prices were absurdly high at this time. In the end, we decided upon the Patriot eXtreme Performance DDR2-800 2GB kit, SUPER TALENT DDR2-800 2GB kit, and the OCZ Reaper HPC 2GB kit as our memory selections. However, due to recent price reductions we would not hesitate recommending the Crucial or G.Skill DDR2-800 2GB kits. Our base configuration for each of our platform setups consists of 2GB but all boards with be additionally tested with a 4GB configuration in both stock and overclocked conditions to ensure compatibility with four DIMMs.

The price war between Intel and AMD continues unabated at this time. While that is very good for consumers, it has made our choice of processors difficult to nail down for testing. Our initial choice was the AMD X2 3800+ versus the Intel E2140, but with the recent price reductions and the elimination of the X2 3800+ from AMD's product roadmap we ended up pairing the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ against the Intel E2160 for our main test results. Both CPUs are priced right around the $85~$90 range and as you will see they offer great performance for the dollar. When we get to the platform testing we will provide additional results with the AMD X2 BE-2300 Energy Efficient CPU, AMD Athlon X2 6000+, Intel E6320 Core 2 Duo, and the Intel Q6600 Quad Core for our ultimate budget gaming system.

The Operating System decision actually turned out to be fairly easy. We still use Windows XP on a daily basis in most of our systems but we have already switched over to Vista for our motherboard testing. Unfortunately, we have been using Vista Ultimate 64-bit but that particular version of Vista just did not make sense at this time for our budget minded µATX roundup. We chose Vista Home Premium 32-bit as our operating system of choice. Not only do most OEM systems ship (often exclusively) with Vista but generally the consumer machines come preloaded with Vista Home Premium 32-bit for compatibility reasons. Whether we like it or not, Vista is the future for Windows based machines so our configuration reflects this trend. The use of Microsoft's latest OS will also serve as a good indication of how up-to-date motherboard manufacturers are in the driver department.

Our other operating system choice is SUSE Linux 10.2. We have received countless requests asking about Linux compatibility on the motherboards we review so we decided to check it out for ourselves with a commercially available package. Our testing will not be as rigorous or extensive as our standard Windows test routines. In fact, let's just say our initial foray into the world of Linux will mostly consist of checking compatibility and driver support at this time. We will provide our results at the very end of the roundup and hopefully our experiences will be helpful for those first time Linux users. (While we're really not interested in starting up a lengthy discussion of which distro is best, if you are then feel free to head over to the forums.)



Enter the Mobo

Last but certainly not least is our selection of motherboards that will be part of our µATX roundup. We looked at several different ways of presenting the information and determined that we will separate each roundup article by chipset manufacturer. As an example, all of the NVIDIA chipset boards will be compared against each other and then we will move to the AMD 690G chipsets and then finally the Intel chipset based boards. We will have a separate chipset and budget CPU comparison article shortly that focuses on the pure performance of the chipsets with various CPUs. We will go into additional details in each roundup article but for now here are the motherboards we have spent more time with than our families over the past few months.

AMD 690G
Jetway M2A692-GHG
ASUS M2A-VM HDMI
MSI K9AGM2-FIH
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
Biostar TA690G
Sapphire Pure Innovation PI-AM2RS690M

NVIDIA 7050
Biostar TForce TF7050-M2
ASRock AliveNF7G-HD
Abit AN-M2HD

NVIDIA 6100/6150
abit NF-M2 nView
ASUS M2NPV-VM
DFI C51PV-M2/G Infinity
ASRock AliveNF6G-VSTA

Intel ATI Radeon Express 1250
abit Fatal1ty F-I90HD
ASRock 4Core1333-FullHD

Intel G965
Intel BLKDG965OTMKR
Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2
ASUS P5B-VM

Intel G33
MSI G33M-FI
Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R
ASUS P5K-VM
Intel DG33TLM

There you have it, approximately 22 boards are planned to be covered utilizing seven different IGP chipsets. Our primary focus (Ed: That got lost somewhere on page 2, didn't it?) in this roundup will be on the features and reliability of each motherboard, but we will also look at performance on an individual basis. We will then perform a platform comparison that will not only compare the performance of our top µATX selections against each other in our individual categories (HTPC, Gaming, Home/Office) but also against platforms based on the more expensive and/or larger ATX cousins. Scattered in between each roundup article will be our side-bar coverage of various components utilized in our platform buildups. Over the course of the next couple of months we will also provide analysis and reviews of several components that caught our interest during the course of testing.

Oh, we almost forgot: we get to do this all over again with the P35 motherboards when we're done with the µATX segment. Where did we put the coffee maker?