The PCChips A33G, a budget mATX board for the general users performed pretty well when paired up with an external graphics card. We can see from the benchmarks that it is indeed comparable to the big boys out there. The probable regret would be the performance of the disks as it still uses the older SIS 965L south bridge.

In terms of features, the board supporst the AM2 socket type for dual core processors or the Sempron series. As it is an integrated chipset, it comes with Mirage 1 graphics with 128M Shared memory. For normal word processing etc, the on board video is sufficient, but for gaming, the integrated mirage 1 shouldn't even be considered. That is why i would presume that most users should look at it as a discrete board with a bonus integrated graphics for normal users that do not game at all.

On top of the integrated graphics, the board comes with 2 channels of DDR2 slots supporting up to 16GB of DDR2 modules. The board has 1 PCIe x16, 1 PCIe x1, 2 xPCI and 1 xCNR slot. In terms of multimedia capabilities, it has a Fast Ethernet connection supported by Broadcom PHY and a 5.1ch audio using ALC655 AC97 codec. There are 2 SATA 1 ports for RAID 0, 1 and 2 IDE channel for PATA HDD. 8 USB ports can be supported in total. If you still use IDE HDD, the PATA Ports comes handy.

Installation is quite straightfoward as it is a mATX board, it fits into most casings easily. The colour coding also helps to identify which pins to connect the front panel connectors. Overclocking features is very minimal. There is only adjustments available for the HTT, voltage adjustments for CPU and VDIMM. There are no options available to adjust the multiplier nor change the ASync memory and ram timings. In our tests, we leave it as SPD which defaults to CAS 5, 5-5-18, 2T.at DDR2-800.

In our overclocking test, we maximise the HTT to 250MHz and the 4000+ booted at 2.5GHz without fail. The RAM was automatically reduced to run in SYNC with the CPU at DDR2-500 at CAS 5. Please refer to BIOS Gallery to see options available.

In Conclusion, i would recommend this board to users who wants to a small foot print machine that will run steadily without much issues. Whether it is for the normal user with integrated graphics or the gamer who can use a higher end graphics card for this board, this board should suffice the not so demanding end users.  For HTPC users, you will just need to purchase a HDMI graphics card, HD sound card and and the system will be VISTA Premium Ready for watching HDTV.

Priced at USD49, it is one of the cheapest AM2 board available.

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Here are my ratings out of 10.