Home Theatre PC motherboard shootout

If you're after a system today, we'd still go for the inexpensive MSI K9AGM3-FIH. It's a perfect interim solution because it's very cheap and comes with a good balance of features. There's also the fact that the AM2 CPU will drop into an AM2+ socket should you want to get one of the newer IGP boards coming in the near future, as these are all likely to feature full-HD video decode offloading. Everything you need is there and while it's not perfect, the video quality on offer is acceptable.

We're genuinely surprised at the outcome – we didn't ever expect the AMD 690G to last anywhere near this long as our preferred choice, however the MSI seems to have got it right with its K9AGM3-FIH as it remains the best solution for the time being.