Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H review - MBO Inspection, Testing setup
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 20 Aug 2007

If you were to be crazy enough, you could (ab)use this motherboard to do CrossFire, as well, since 690G is compatible with CF. Of course, you'd have to "give up" some of the bandwidth since there are no two PCI-Express x16 connectors, but that doesn't mean that CF isn't doable. You can make it happen by installing a card in the blue slot (full X16) and the orange slot (x4) and "suffer the consequences".

You can use up to 4GB of memory since there are four memory slots, and memory can be anything from DDR2-800 to DDR2-533. Chipset (690G Northbridge and RD600 Southbridge) is passively cooled, so don't expect to have cooler noise while you use it. Which is one of the reasons we like entry-level products for a small amount of money.

We used the same testing setup we used for the previous two 690G tests so we can do a decent comparison:
- OCZ SLI-Ready DDR2-8500 modules
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
- Corsair 620W PSU