Labs

We've nothing against budget boards, and at £27 the snappily named A690GM2MA-8KRS2H is this month's cheapest. It's a small board built to the microATX form factor and, while it's not lavishly featured, its specification is appropriate for its size and price.

For example, the Foxconn's single PCI Express 16x slot looks mean next to heavyweights such as the three-slotted Striker II board, but then you wouldn't buy a board like this as a multi-GPU platform. And while it has only four SATA channels, microATX boards are intended

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for compact cases that won't take dozens of drives.

The conservative feature set keeps power consumption low at just 97W. This, along with its size and integrated graphics, might tempt you to choose it for a media-centre PC or a budget desktop system. It isn't ideally suited to either role, though. The X1250 GPU does support TV output, but there's no socket for it on the backplate - just an unconnected header on the board. What's more, it uses AMD's old Avivo video system instead of the more recent Unified Video Decoder. This makes video playback more CPU intensive than it would be with a more recent GPU, such as the HD 3200 found in the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H.

If, on the other hand, you're building a desktop system, be warned that the 690G chipset doesn't officially support the Phenom. So we can't recommend the A690GM2MA-8KRS2H for a cheap quad-core workstation.

As this isn't an enthusiast's board, it's no great shock that BIOS options are limited as well, with no option to change the CPU multiplier. What you're left with is a cheap, unexciting way to run an undistinguished Athlon or Sempron system.