The TA690G is a mATX motherboard, which means it is smaller than your typical ATX motherboard. It is absolutely not your typical gaming motherboard, but it still boasts various great features that should encourage a lot of gamers to take a look at this board.

As I stated earlier, this is a mATX motherboard. If you are not in the market for a mATX motherboard for the size, you might be for the features. Typically, mATX motherboards have all the very important of the larger ATX motherboards and are almost always found with onboard graphics of some sort a nice feature for no gamers.

Chipset specs

The AMD 690 chipset is under the heat-sink. It helps run the computer and all the parts mutually. This is the reason I select this motherboard. AMD is not striking the marks with their graphics cards or CPUs recently, but their chipsets seem to be doing well. There are a lot of features that make this chipset stand out from the competition.

This is AMD's first try at a chipset, but it looks like they are off to a good start. I am confident they got help from their purchase of ATI some years back. A large selling point for this chipset was the native support for HDMI onboard. Not a lot of motherboards come with this, but the AMD 690 chipsets come with HDMI native along with DVI and VGA. The HDMI and DVI are self-determining, so you can run one connection to your TV and the other to your monitor.

With such an abundant array of video options, what type of core is in this chipset? It is the Radon X1250, which is based off of the X700. This was the low end graphics card a few years back, so now it certainly is not going to be playing Crisis at any settings. This core should be able to handle Far Cry acceptably, but do not look for something more advanced than this.

The big downside I see as far as specs is that this core only supports DX 9.0b. This is years old. I recognize that 9.0c does not add very much, but I think that it must have been supported; hell, we are on DX 10 now and this core is two decade behind.

With all the disk is not incredible that AMD would contain the Avivo video processing engine. First seen in mid-range and high-end cards, AMD has dropped this technology into their included chips. This is a great aspect for those who will be using this motherboard in an HTPC. Avivo handles a lot of video playback features, for example 3:2 pull down, video scaling, decode acceleration, and more. Spec wise, this is looking like an amazing chipset for HTPCs.