It is always important to have in mind the audience a given product is targeted to. ASUS M2A-VM and AMD690G are clearly targeted to digital home PCs, where gaming isn’t the most important factor. For this PC class, video quality, connectivity options and size are more relevant.

This motherboard has on its side the support for two video monitors, which is great. On motherboards with on-board video based on other chipsets you need to buy an add-on video card if you’d like to have more than one video display. If you want to build a cheap system with support for two video monitors, ASUS M2A-VM is your best option.

On the other hand, we expected more from this motherboard, especially on the connectivity side. Even though it has two FireWire ports – a must for folks that want to connect their digital camcorder to their PCs – this motherboard has some serious flaws for a motherboard targeted to be a digital audio and video editing workstation.

First, the audio input quality isn’t good enough for today’s standards. This board provides only 85 dB on its audio input and you need at least 95 dB there. For this reason, avoid this motherboard if you want to build a system to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting VHS tapes, cassette tapes, LPs, etc to digital format).

Secondly, even though this motherboard provides eight-channel audio, this motherboard has only three analog audio connectors soldered on it. SPDIF (digital audio interface) is only available together with a bracket that doesn’t come with the board. It should either have SPDIF connectors soldered on the motherboard or come with this bracket.

And third, HDMI support, one of the most spoken new features provided by AMD 690G, is only available through an add-on card, which doesn’t come with this motherboard. You need to buy M2A-VM HDMI to get this board (which also brings coaxial SPDIF input and output).

As for its performance, as we expected it reached a good overall performance, on the same level of high-end motherboards. This was obvious to us, as since AMD64 CPUs have their memory controller embedded inside the CPU, motherboards don’t play an important role on performance.

From our benchmarking we can assume that AMD 690G is optimized to DirectX 9.0, being a better option to GeForce6100-405 and Radeon Xpress 1100 if you play this class of games or will run Windows Vista (Home Premium and up) and want a better performance on the Windows Aero graphical interface than the one provided by other motherboards with on-board video. The problem is that we achieved better results with these other two chipset on DirectX 8.1 simulations.

Also, don’t expect a good 3D performance from any motherboard with on-board video: even the most low-end video card available on the market, like GeForce 6200 TurboCache with 64-bit memory interface, is faster.

Costing around USD 80 in the USA, we recommend this motherboard only if you want to build a cheap system with support for two video monitors and/or if you want a better performance on Windows Aero (the new graphical interface found from Windows Vista Home Premium up) than other motherboards with on-board video. If this isn’t your case, there are cheaper motherboards on the market that will provide you the same features – for example, ECS GeForce 6100SM-M costs only USD 60.