Asus M2A-VM Desktop Motherboard - AMD 690G Chipset - Socket AM2 PGA-940

Great for overclocking

Strengths: This runs the 5000+ Black Edition processor with water cooling at a stable overclock of 3.3Ghz. The ability to run multiple monitors (with ATI cards only I believe) is a plus for multimedia applications.

Weakness: This board is mATX and only has 2 PCI slots (instead of 3) which makes its utility as a storage server less then ideal, but this is a give

Overview The motherboard installed without incident and I had no problems at all with anything. This runs the 5000+ Black Edition processor with water cooling at a stable overclock of 3.3Ghz. The ability to run multiple monitors (with ATI cards only I believe) is a plus for multimedia applications. Good The onboard video is quite good, which allows this machine to be used primarely as a gaming...
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Overview
The motherboard installed without incident and I had no problems at all with anything. This runs the 5000+ Black Edition processor with water cooling at a stable overclock of 3.3Ghz. The ability to run multiple monitors (with ATI cards only I believe) is a plus for multimedia applications.
Good
The onboard video is quite good, which allows this machine to be used primarely as a gaming computer with the added PCIe-16x slot then later on to be used as a server or multimedia box with the necessity to add any additional hardware (with the exception of a RAID card). The machine is very stable and works perfectly
The Bad
This board is mATX and only has 2 PCI slots (instead of 3) which makes its utility as a storage server less then ideal, but this is a given. The mothboard has no significant flaws to speak of and I highly recommend it.

By jekylltech - Mar 1, 2008

Nice board, but very finicky about memory.

Strengths: great ati onboard graphics, good pricepoint, dvi, and asus reliability and feature richness.

Weakness: Very finicky about memory. Using Crucial ddr2 667, board took 3-4 tries to boot. After researching, I found that increasing memory voltage from 1.8 to 2.0 fixed this. (1.9 did not fix it.)

After increasing memory voltage, this board has started flawlessly every time. 2D Graphics are good, board seems plenty fast with athlon 64x2 4800. With bios AMD cool-n-quiet enabled, this is the quietest pc I have (using antec nsk 1300). I'm running Mandriva 2008 64bit linux on this, and it seems to work very well. Early on it seemed like USB flash drive data tranfers were occassionaly very...
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After increasing memory voltage, this board has started flawlessly every time. 2D Graphics are good, board seems plenty fast with athlon 64x2 4800. With bios AMD cool-n-quiet enabled, this is the quietest pc I have (using antec nsk 1300). I'm running Mandriva 2008 64bit linux on this, and it seems to work very well. Early on it seemed like USB flash drive data tranfers were occassionaly very slow. Updated to 1603 bios (very easy to do from a flash drive) and it seems to have been corrected. The ATI graphics are not as well supported in linux as Nvidia for 3D graphics, but it can be made to work. I only use the 2D and that looks great. Would probably get the M2N-VM vs. M2A-VM for linux if I were to do it again.

By Dirk; - Feb 10, 2008

Great motherboard for the price

Strengths: Small, but great features. one of only a few MicroATX boards I have seen with 8 gigs of memory available

Weakness: only 1 IDE port and no firewire.

Installing this board was easy, instruction manual was very clear. No troubles with stability as is typical with ASUS. The limit on 1 IDE port is understandable since SATA is the new standard and there are 4 of these. Also has DVI and VGA ports for video, though I plan on expanding shortly, still works great. Supports digital audio on the front panel. I just wish it had Firewire.

By TSDagger - Dec 20, 2007

Excellent MOBO

Strengths: DVI interface. 4 USB prots or more. 4 RAM slots. Onboard graphic card is good.

Weakness: The rear I/O panel is too thin. Only one IDE.

For the price, it is an excellent board. I am using windows XP, amd X2 4600+ and 4G RAM. The system runs very well. So far, no driver problem. I'd like to try this AMD 690G chipset again. It should provide a good support to AMD CPUs.

By icery - Jul 28, 2007

Nice motherboard, but has some bugs

Strengths: Cheap On-board DVI, sound, network. Voltage control and some overclocking options

Weakness: Cool'n Quiet doesn't work properly (as of 06/01 bios).

I made a lot of research on 690g motherboards and finally decided on this one. You can adjust cpu, memory, northbridge voltages (including undervolting the CPU to 0.8V). You can also adjust CPU FSB (200 to 400) and memory speeds (DDR400 to DDR800). No memory timing adjustments are possible. The only thing that bugs me about this board is that Cool'n Quiet does not work properly. Multiplier can be...
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I made a lot of research on 690g motherboards and finally decided on this one. You can adjust cpu, memory, northbridge voltages (including undervolting the CPU to 0.8V). You can also adjust CPU FSB (200 to 400) and memory speeds (DDR400 to DDR800). No memory timing adjustments are possible.

The only thing that bugs me about this board is that Cool'n Quiet does not work properly. Multiplier can be changed properly, however, voltage stays the same (as the bios-set value). I tried AMD's own drivers, crystalCPUID and RMClock, all with the same results. You need to use Asus probe or Asus Cool'n quiet utility to get the correct voltage, since CPU-Z reports incorrect voltages.

One of my favorite applications speedfan also does not work, however q-fan works quite well.

It's very stable so far, I've seen no blue screens at all when running XP.

By serguzest - May 27, 2007