Energy-saving Motherboard: Gigabyte With HDMI And DVI
The limits of solar energy mean that we can't even consider a separate graphics card in our build. They simply require much too much power to run, whether we consider a passively cooled graphics card or a high-end model. According to our measurements, even a small, passively cooled ATI Radeon X1300 draws 88.5 W at idle. This level of energy consumption exceeds that of our entire system, including the monitor!
GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard
To take advantage of the most current technologies and to permit our solar-powered PC to function as a video playback device, we chose the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard. This motherboard is equipped with the AMD 690G chipset, and supports both HDMI and DVI with HDCP output, as well as VGA. In tandem with the CPU, this chipset delivers enough computing power to play back high-definition video (HD-DVD or Blu-ray).
This board delivers video output via HDMI, DVI, and VGA.
This Gigabyte board comes in the microATX format. A great many motherboards with integrated graphics are available in this form factor, because they're widely used by OEMs in applications where add-on cards are seldom needed. Nevertheless, this motherboard does include a PCIe x16 slot, a PCI-e x1 slot, and two PCI slots as well.
The Southbridge chipset delivers on-board graphics, but this motherboard also includes a PCIe x16 slot for a graphics card as well
The port block shows the various connections available from this motherboard
