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

The Test Systems

This is the first motherboard/chipset article that Legit reviews has written that uses Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit as the operating system. While Windows XP is what people are running today many people will be reading this article down the road that will be on Vista systems and this board was designed to run Microsoft Vista and that is what we ran on it. We used a clean installation of Vista Ultimate 32-bit and left the power management set to balance. All benchmarks results shown on the following charts were averaged from five test runs.

We will compare the AMD 690G motherboard to the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 and 6150SE motherboards. You may be wondering why we are using two different boards for testing. The original 6150/430, which was formally announced in September 2005, was a two chip solution which incorporated our hardware PureVideo engine. About a year later, NVIDIA introduced a new version of the 6100 family, in a single chip platform solution. In addition to a die shrink and other technical advances, this new 6100 version incorporated hardware z-cull into the GPU, but did not incorporate our PureVideo video processing engine. As a result, ODMs and OEMs utilized the original 6150/430 PureVideo combination for media center SKUs, while the new solution was utilized for more high-volume, mainstream, lower-cost SKUs. A new performance driver for this new single chip solution was also made available in 2006 that took advantage of the hardware z-cull capability, leading to overall better 3D performance. This led OEMs and ODMs to rebrand this solution as the GeForce 6150SE. We will be including both the 6150 and 6150SE to cover both of NVIDIA’s Socket AM2 solutions. We used the NVIDIA nForce/GeForce driver package version 15.00G with a release date of February 5, 2007 for our testing on these boards

AMD 690G Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Motherboard	MSI K9AGM2 690G
Memory	2GB Corsair PC2-8888C4
Hard Drive	Western Digital 250GB
Cooling	Zalman CNPS9700 NT
Power Supply	Corsair 620W
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

NVIDIA 6150SE Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Motherboard	ASUS M2NPV-VM
Memory	2GB Corsair PC2-8888C4
Hard Drive	Western Digital 250GB
Cooling	Zalman CNPS9700 NT
Power Supply	Corsair 620W
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

NVIDIA 6150 Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Motherboard	ASUS M2N-MX
Memory	2GB Corsair PC2-8888C4
Hard Drive	Western Digital 250GB
Cooling	Zalman CNPS9700 NT
Power Supply	Corsair 620W
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

Please note that all of the test systems had the memory set to 800MHz at 4-4-4-12 2T timings, but due to a BIOS issue the MSI K9AGM2 was run at 4-6-4-12 2T timings.