Rolling out on MSI's K9AGM2
AMD expects 690G-based motherboards to hit the market starting in a couple of weeks. Asus will probably be first, followed by MSI, Foxconn, ECS, Gigabyte, and others. We've done our testing with MSI's K9AGM2, and it's quite a good little Micro ATX motherboard.

The AMD 690G north bridge is manufactured by UMC on a power-efficient 80nm process node, so it doesn't require more than a tiny passive heatsink to keep cool. Our sample motherboard didn't even come with a south bridge heatsink, despite the fact that the SB600 is built on a larger 130nm node by TSMC. Production boards will apparently come with a low-profile south bridge heatsink, though.

In addition to the AMD 690G chipset, the K9AGM2 sports ALC888 codec and RTL8111B Gigabit Ethernet chips from Realtek. Thankfully, the RTL8111B rides a PCI Express interface, so there's no need to worry about sharing PCI bus bandwidth with other peripherals.

If you do want to add expansion cards, the K9AGM2 provides a couple of PCI options alongside PCI Express x1 and x16 slots.

Unfortunately, the board's layout hasn't been optimized for longer graphics cards with wide coolers. A GeForce 7900 GTX blocks access to not one, not two, but all four of the board's Serial ATA ports. We were able to gain access to two of the ports using right-angle SATA cables, but even that required some creativity. Longer graphics cards with double-wide coolers rarely find their way into budget Micro ATX boards, so this is hardly a show-stopping problem. However, it's something to consider if you're looking to build a pint-sized gaming system for LAN parties using this mobo.

Moving to the port cluster reveals the AMD 690G's ace in the hole—an HDCP-compliant HDMI video output port that also pipes out sound from the onboard audio. This HDMI output joins a standard VGA output, but MSI doesn't take advantage of the chipset's DVI output or integrated TV encoder. Indeed, few motherboard makers make take full advantage of the 690G's video output capabilities, and those that do may only do so through riser cards with additional outputs.