AMD’s 690G/V Series Chipset Preview and Benchmarks

DAMMIT’s First Joint Product Launch

Today marks the first product launch (AMD690) from the new and improved AMD (AMD+ATI). The AMD 690 series chipset represents the company’s first joint effort at making a chipset that brings together the combined strengths of AMD CPU and platform technology features of the ATI Radeon X1250 GPU. The integrated graphics are based on the Radeon X700 core, but include several improvements that help beef up the X700 technology that was originally launched in 2004 exclusively on the discrete graphics market. By adding HDMI support and DVI outputs, the Radeon X1250 delivers the premium Windows Vista experience by allowing end users to enable features like the Aero user interface. By launching the AMD 690 series chipset it is clear that AMD has aimed this product at the mainstream market, which makes up more than 90% of the overall market according to recent data.

According to the trend chart shown above from Current Analysis, it seems that the sales of computers with discrete graphics are declining. The trend has been attributed to the high price premium that discrete graphics cards are sold at and improvements on integrated graphics cards. Now that Microsoft has finally released Windows Vista, many in the lower and mainstream markets will be looking to upgrade their systems in order to be able to use features available in the market today (HDMI, HDCP, DVI). Before today, the ATI Xpress 200 chipset was the leading ATI based platform that had integrated graphics. The graphics on the Xpress 200 were based on the Radeon X300 series, so by upgrading the graphics and CPU socket that is being used AMD is able to boost the performace of the entire platform.

Since this is AMD.ATI’s first product launch since they merged companies it will be interesting to see how the motherboard makers adapt to the new company. AMD has been able to silence those concerns since twelve companies will be offering 690G/690V motherboards in the upcoming weeks.

Legit Reviews has recently been building and using several AMD Socket AM2 based chipsets in our media center computer and to be honest integrated graphics have become better since the last time we have taken a look at them. Read on to find out more about the AMD 690 chipset and to see how the AMD 690G stacks up against the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 and 6150 SE chipsets!