Introduction

Recently AMD launched its first new chipset using property from the recent acquisition of ATI, the AMD 690 series.  It comes in two flavors: the 690G that features integrated HDMI and DVI output and the 690V that does not.  My first review of this chipset was on the MSI K9AGM2 motherboard and today I am following up with an Asus model that was sent along a few days later.   

If you want additional information on the entire specifications of the 690 chipset, I strongly suggest you take a look at the previous AMD 690G review for all the details!

Specifications (from Asus.com)

CPU Support AMD Socket AM2 Athlon64 / Athlon64 FX / Athlon64 X2 / Sempron   AMD Cool 'n' Quiet Technology   AMD64 architecture enables simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing    AMD Live! Ready   Chipset AMD 690G   ATI  SB600   Front Side Bus 2000 / 1600 MT/s Memory Dual channel memory architecture    4 x 240-pin DIMM, support max. 8GB DDR2 800/667/533 ECC and Non-ECC,un-buffered memory    VGA Integrated  ATI Radeon X1250-based graphics   Maximum shared memory of 256 MB   Supports DVI-D with max. resolution 2560x1600 (@ 60Hz) (It may not display 1080p smoothly when playing HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc due to current version player limit) Supports RGB with max. resolution 2048 x 1536 (@85Hz)    Dual VGA output support:   RGB & DVI   Note: DVI-D can not be converted to output RGB Signal to CRT. Expansion Slots 1 x PCI Express x16   1 x PCI Express x1   2 x PCI    Storage 1 x UltraDMA 133/100   4 x Serial ATA 3Gb/s supporting RAID 0, RAID 1,RAID10   LAN PCIe Gb LAN Audio ALC883 High Definition Audio 6-channel CODEC    Supports Jack-Sensing, Enumeration, and Jack-Retasking   Supports S/PDIF out  interface   Overclocking Features SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection) from 200MHz to 400MHz at 1MHz increment    Adjustable CPU Voltage at 0.0125V increment   ASUS C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall)    USB 10 USB2.0/1.1 ports Special Features ASUS MyLogo2   ASUS CrashFreeBIOS3   ASUS EZ Flash2   ASUS Q-Fan   ASUS O.C Profile   ASUS Music Alarm    Back Panel I/O Ports 1 x Parallel    1 x PS/2 Mouse    1 x PS/2 Keyboard    1 x DVI    1 x VGA   1 x RJ45    4 x USB 2.0/1.1     6-channel Audio I/O Internal I/O Connectors 3 x USB 2.0 connector supports additional 6 USB 2.0 ports    High Definition Front panel audio connector    COM port connector   CD audio-in connector    1 x S/PDIF output connector    CPU / Chassis/ Power Fan connectors   Chassis Intrusion connector   24-pin EATX power connector    4-pin ATX 12V Power connector    BIOS 8Mb Flash ROM, Award BIOS, PnP, DMI2.0, WfM2.0, SMBIOS 2.3 Manageability WfM 2.0, DMI 2.0, WOL by PME, WOR by PXE,  WOR by PME  Support CD Drivers    ASUS PC Probe II    ASUS LiveUpdate Utility   Anti -virus software(OEM version)  Accessories User' s manual    1 x Serial ATA cable   1 x SATA power cable   1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable    1 x FDD cable    1 x I/O Shield  Form Factor uATX Form Factor, 9.6" x 9.0" (24.5cm x 22.9cm)

Layout for micro-ATX motherboards is pretty standard, and as such, the Asus M2A-VM motherboard doesn't differ much over the previously reviewed MSI K9AGM2 motherboard. 

Just like with the MSI motherboard, the Asus M2A-VM motherboard uses passive cooling on the north bridge though this board uses a passive cooler on the SB600 south bridge as well. 

The AM2 processor socket uses a standard cooler mounting bracket and you can see the 4-pin ATX 12v connection for CPU power in the corner of the image as well. 

The four DIMM slots support memory up to DDR2-800 speeds; users looking to add extra memory to possible HTPC systems will see the move from two DIMM slots on the MSI to the four seen here as a nice improvement.  The ATX power connector, single IDE channel and the floppy channel are seen here as well. 

The expansion configuration consists of a single x16 PCIe connection for discrete graphics, two legacy PCI slots and a single x1 PCIe slot for an additional accessory.  These are the same options that the MSI K9AGM2 motherboard offered but with the x1 PCIe slot at the top of the layout. 

The bottom of the motherboard holds all the remaining connections including storage and acecssory options.  There are four total SATA 3.0 Gb/s connections and only a single IDE channel for up to two devices.  If you look closely you'll also see three headers for USB 2.0 dongles that can support up to 10 total connections.

The external connectors on the M2A-VM motherboard speak to the budget board user with only three analog audio connections, four USB 2.0 connections and a single Gigabit LAN port.  There are two connections for the integrated X1250 graphics - one DVI and one VGA that can support dual monitor output.

The extras that come with the M2A-VM motherboard are pretty sparse and include the necessary IDE and floppy cable and only a single SATA data and power cable. 

As you might expect with a budget board in a mATX form factor, the BIOS on the Asus M2A-VM does not contain a plethora of overclocking and tweaking options.  However, it does have a much more open BIOS than the MSI motherboard we looked at last month. 

Right off the bat we can adjust a few overclocking settings such as the voltage going to the north and south bridge chips.

Memory voltage can be increased to 2.1v.

The CPU voltage can be increased by 0.1v -- this is just a minor tweak setting for users needing that last little push of stability.

The multiplier can be adjusted as well; up and down if you are running an FX processor and down if you using a standard Athlon X2 CPU. 

The Vcore voltage can be increased up to 1.55v for overclocking the CPU.

Overclocking the on-die processor bus speed is possible up to 400 MHz, twice the default 200 MHz.

The Asus BIOS also allows you to enable or disable the AMD Cool 'n' Quiet funcationality -- leaving it on will allow the system to lower power consumption when full CPU speed is not necessary.

You can set the default memory speed from DDR2-400 to DDR2-800 and a couple of settings in between depending on the memory modules you use in the system.

You can manually adjust the HyperTransport bus between the processor and chipset here.

All of the on-board features can be enabled or disabled here in the BIOS.

Though the hardware monitoring is pretty basic, the information the Asus M2A-VM motherboard provides can be useful including the fan speeds, voltages and temperatures.

A unique Asus feature in the BIOS is the ability to use your PC and a music CD as an alarm clock!

Most Asus BIOS' have had support for profiles and the fact that we are seeing it on the budget-based M2A-VM motherboard indicates that the feature is here for the long run.

Another great feature of the BIOS I like is the ability to flash the BIOS from within the BIOS -- no longer do you need a bootable floppy disc to safely update your motherboard.

The test setup for the AMD 690 benchmarking starts a big shift for us at PC Perspective: we moved from Windows XP to Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit for our testing environment.  While not EVERYTHING is ironed out yet, I felt that more and more users will be adopting the new OS and thus our testing should be as future-proof as possible.

For this review, I was able to include the competing Intel platform rather than the NVIDIA chipset for the AM2 platform.  System configurations are specified as to present as close to equal pricing as possible.

AMD 690 Chipset Test System Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon X2 5200+
Motherboards	Asus M2A-VM RS690 Motherboard MSI K9AGM2 RS690 Motherboard - Review
Memory	Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
Hard Drive	Western Digital Raptor 150 GB - Review
Sound Card	Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value
Video Card	NVIDIA 7600 GT Integrated Video Where Indicated
Video Drivers	100.65
DirectX Version	DX 9.0c
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Intel G965 Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Motherboards	Asus P5B-VM G965 Motherboard
Memory	Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
Hard Drive	Western Digital Raptor 150 GB - Review
Sound Card	Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value
Video Card	NVIDIA 7600 GT Integrated Video Where Indicated
Video Drivers	8.1.1.1010
DirectX Version	DX 9.0c
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Benchmarks:

• SiSoft Sandra XI
• Windows Media Encoder 9
• DivX 6.5.1
• LAME MT
• WinRAR 3.72
• 3DMark06
• Call of Duty 2 1.01
• PCMark05

SiSoft Sandra XI

We ran the standard SiSoft Sandra synthetic processor test.

SiSoft Sandra XI

We ran the standard SiSoft Sandra synthetic memory test.

The Asus M2A-VM's lack of additional memory settings is giving it a big disadvantage here as the Gigabyte motherboard can run at 1T timings while the Asus board runs at 2T.  Note that the Intel platform falls well behind in both CPU and memory tests here as well.

WinRAR 3.72

Our own custom WinRAR benchmark, this test takes a large 650 MB text file and compresses it with the highest compression option. 

LAME MT MP3 Encoding

This custom test uses the LAME MT engine to benchmark encoding a 650 MB WAV file into a standard 128 kbps MP3 file.  We used the Microsoft compiler for the most fair results.

Both of the AMD 690G motherboards perform very similarly here in our WinRAR and MP3 encoding tests, though the Intel E6400 processor easily takes the win in overall performance.

DivX 6.5.1 with XMPEG 5.03

This test uses the latest DivX codec that supports multi-threaded encoding on the XMPEG application for easy encoding setup.  Here we had a 2 GB video that we asked XMPEG to convert the first 10,000 frames to DivX.

Windows Media Encoder 9

This custom test uses the standard Windows Media Encoder to convert a 720p HD video file to a 2Mb CBR DVD-quality video in two passes. 

In this test, the added memory speed on the MSI K9AGM2 made a HUGE difference in the results on the DivX encoding test -- the MSI board was 21% faster than the Asus M2A-VM motherboard.  My guess is that a BIOS update that allows for more memory timings will equalize these scores. 

Our gaming tests set out to find games that were heavily CPU dependent in order to test for platform differences.  Games at higher resolutions with more emphasis on the GPU wont show us any differences, if they exist.

Call of Duty 2 v1.20 - Discrete Graphics

We ran CoD2 at 1024x768 with the GPU settings at Medium.

Using the discrete 7600 GT graphics card, the Intel system is a bit faster than the AMD systems as we expected, though the Asus M2A-VM does have a better showing than the MSI product.

We of course had to test the performance of the integrated graphics on both the new AMD 690G chipset and the Intel G965.  Since these are much lower performance GPU cores than we are usually testing, we are using some tests we haven't in some time such as 3DMark05 and Far Cry. 

Interestingly, in the 3DMark tests and PCMark05, the Intel G965 graphics solution does very well.  That being said, the actual game that we tested here, Far Cry, an intense but older title, is barely even playable on the Intel G965 motherboard.  This leads me to believe that while the Intel integrated graphics will do well in some basic 3D apps, for games, you are definitely going to want to move to the AMD 690 chipset.

Using HDTach 3.0.1.0 and a few handy peripherals, we were able to get some benchmark numbers off of both the SATA controllers on the boards as well as the USB and FireWire connections. 

SATA Performance South Bridge

Here we tested the two south bridge based SATA controllers.  We used a new Raptor 150 GB 10k RPM hard drive for the test drive.

USB Performance

Taking a 7200 RPM IDE external hard drive from Western Digital, we use HDTach to find the top transfer speeds on both motherboards.

FireWire Performance

This external drive has both USB 2.0 and FireWire support so these results are from the same drive with the FireWire connection.

SATA performance is equal across the board, though on the USB test we see the Intel chipset having a healthy lead.  Unfortunately, the Asus M2A-VM motherboard doesn't have any Firewire support; but looking at the MSI K9AGM2 board, the AMD 690 chipset's SB600 south bridge can't keep up with Intel's solution.

Our network tests use the ntttcp application distributed by Microsoft for testing network controller's efficiency.  The program creates a number of threads from a server machine to spit data at the test machine at up to Gigabit speeds.  Both maximum throughput and CPU utilization are tested.

Network Interface Test Max Throughput

Network Interface Test CPU Utilization

Performance on the Gigabit LAN on the Asus M2A-VM motherboard falls in line with both the MSI AMD 690 board and the Intel G965 P5B-VM.

For my power testing comparisons, we looked at both discrete and integrated graphics solutions.

Discrete Power Consumption

Integrated Power Consumption

Here we can see that the Intel G965 chipset on the Asus P5B-VM motherboard uses quite a bit more power when in idle mode with both discrete and integrated graphics options.  However, once the system is at full load, the Core 2 Duo E6400 and G965 uses just a few watts less than the Athlon X2 5200+ on the AMD 690.

Performance

As we saw in the review of the MSI K9AGM2, the AMD 690G chipset is on par with the performance of the NVIDIA MCP61 chipset for the AM2 platform.  In this article, we looked at how the Asus M2A-VM motherboard compared to the previous MSI model as well as the latest Intel integrated graphics chipset, the G965. 

In our platform tests, the AMD 690 chipset coupled with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor, was able to win a slight majority of results.  Where it faltered slightly was in the connectivity options like USB and Firewire; where it thrived was in real-world game play scenarios. 

Comparing the Asus and MSI motherboards, the MSI had an advantage in memory performance thanks to Asus' lack of support for memory timing adjustment in the current BIOS revision.  I have been told by Asus that this will be coming in a new BIOS very soon so I would expect the performance levels of the M2A-VM to jump up to at least where the MSI K9AGM2 stands now. 

X1250 versus Intel G965

Comparing the X1250 integrated GPU solution on the AMD 690 chipset to that of the Intel G965 chipset requires more than just a 3DMark run or two.  In fact, in 3DMark06, the Intel chipset performed quite a bit faster than the AMD solution; but we knew something wasn't quite right there.  Looking at the performance results on our Far Cry testing, a game that is still visually impressive some years after its release, the Intel G965 was only able to pull about 10 FPS while the AMD 690 chipset was getting three times that. 

In Intel's own admission, the G965 chipset is going to be playing many games with optimal image quality or performance -- there is a list of very popular games on their site that just don't work -- a problem that ATI's graphics solutions won't have thanks to their dedication to the GPU market and strong driver team.

It's quite apparent to me that if you are planning on doing even intermediate gaming on a PC using one of these platforms, the AMD 690 chipset and the Athlon processors are better solutions than any CPU on the Intel G965. 

Features

The AMD 690's best features are the built-in support for HDMI and DVI right from the graphics logic; though the Asus model test here doesn't have HDMI, it does have DVI with HDCP support.  Having this option for users looking to build an HTPC system should be a big plus -- with one caveat.  The X1250 does NOT support HD-DVD or Blu-ray decoding.  The GPU core is just not fast enough to handle the H.264 off loading and as such I feel the HDMI and HDCP support is really just fluff.  Sticking with VGA and DVI would have been fine for most users. 

The rest of the chipset is pretty standard but includes enough options to keep most budget users and business users satisfied. 

Pricing

As of this publication, pricing on the Asus M2A-VM motherboard is limited to what Newegg is showing: $79.99.  The price on the X2 5200+ processor currently sits at $225, for a total price of $305 for the AMD platform.

The Asus P5B-VM motherboard that uses the G965 chipset is currently for sale for around $115 and the Core 2 Duo E6400 processor we used in testing comes in around $222.  That makes the total price for the Intel solution $337.

While that difference might not seem like much to enthusiast users, for budget builders trying to squeeze by and businesses buying hundreds or thousands of systems, that $30 can add up very quickly.  The AMD platform performs very well in comparison to the Intel platform and runs cheaper; that's a great combination.

Final Thoughts

The Asus M2A-VM motherboard is the second one using the new AMD 690G chipset we have reviewed and it performed very well.  The MSI motherboard did show the Asus option up in a couple of memory-latency dependent benchmarks simply because the Asus motherboard didn't allow for memory timing adjustments like the competition did -- but I'd expect a BIOS fix for this very soon from the engineers at Asus.  Support for four DIMMs and having both DVI and VGA output on the board offers a compelling enough configuration that users will definitely want to keep it in their list of options for a budget computer or HTPC. 

And now that we have compared the Intel G965 platform against this AMD offering, I feel confident that anyone looking for an integrated graphics solution should be leaning in the direction of AMD once again.