MSI’s P6NGM is an ideal board to build a compact or home theatre PC around, especially the latter as it comes with a HDMI port on board.

Built on MSI’s familiar red PCB, the P6NGM is a Micro ATX format board that, despite its compact size, is well laid out with space between the memory latches and the graphics card slot.

But there are a couple of niggles: the USB headers are placed at the back of the board, which might cause problems with the front panel USB connectors in some PC cases, and if the Com port header and the Front Panel header were swapped around it might make life easier too.

The board uses a passively cooled Nvidia MCP73U chipset to support Intel’s Socket 775 processor range with FSB speeds of 1,333, 1,066, 800 and 533MHz. The board provides two single-channel Dimm slots that support up to a maximum of 4GB of 800/677 or 533MHz DDR2 memory.

The motherboard gives you a choice when it comes to graphics – there’s a single x16 PCI Express slot for a dedicated graphics card or you can opt for the onboard graphics powered by the Geforce 7150m GPU, which is clocked at 630MHz and has a 256MB frame buffer.

As well as the graphics card slot there is a single x1 PCI Express slot along with two PCI versions, which should be enough as both the eight-channel HD audio and Gigabit Ethernet are integrated into the board.
The four 3Gbytes/sec Sata ports are mounted towards the edge of the board and are far enough away from the x16 PCI Express slot so that only the longest graphics cards will obstruct them.

Overall, this is a compact motherboard with a surprisingly good set of features which would be best put to use in a home theatre PC.