The mother of all boards

Steve was still trying to get me to give up on the idea of having a separate graphics card to drive the HD output. He finally sold me when he told me that, if I wanted to add a graphics card later and it used the same chip manufacturer as the integrated graphics processor on the motherboard, the two GPU's could work together to render the graphics. Now, having graphics support on the motherboard didn't seem like such a waste.

A Micro ATX still seemed like a good form factor for the motherboard, even though it has a limited number of expansion slots. Still, with most of the I/O devices already on the motherboard, the need for expansion slots became significantly less.

I started by going to the Gigabyte website and selecting their motherboard product list. Then I chose the AM2 socket motherboards. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as the best graphics chips that the AM2 motherboards support is the AMD 740G. I eventually chose the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2.

When I told Steve about my choice, he said "We can get you a better motherboard than that". With a little searching, he found the Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H, which uses the AMD 780G Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP). When I asked why this one over the other, he showed me a review comparing the 740's performance with the 780's and the same CPU chip. Both were able to play an HD sample nicely, but with the 740G, the CPU was running at 95% and with the 780G it was running at 5%. Thus, if I wanted to watch an HD program while the CPU was doing something in the background, like say recording another program, a motherboard that uses the 780G IGP is definitely the way to go.

I was not able to find the article that Steve showed me, but I did find an interesting one at TweakTown proposing the 4850e and 780g combination.