ASUS' first board using the new AMD RS690G chipset looks very promising. It comes in the small MicroATX form factor and is all passively cooled. This makes the board an ideal candidate for a quiet Media PC system. The integrated VGA with DVI/Analog output means you don't need to buy an additional video card. While the Radeon X1250 can certainly not play the latest games, it still has enough performance for video decoding.
The HDMI output option is available only in the "HDMI" version of the ASUS M2A-VM. Unfortunately the add-in card goes into the PCI-E x16 slot.
In our performance testing we see that the board is about 3% to 8% slower in the benchmarks that rely on memory performance, compared to an ATI RD580 reference platform. However, you have to consider that a good RD580 board costs almost three times as much as the ASUS M2A-VM motherboard.