Integrated Graphics vs Budget ATI and Nvidia Video Cards

ECS RS482-M (1.0A) Performance For Under $60

For our budget AMD motherboard we found the ECS RS482-M (1.0A) Socket 939 ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 Micro ATX AMD motherboard hard to pass up. With a price tag of under $60 we found this motherboard fit the bill for our test system as if I had to buy an AMD based motherboard for a budget system with integrated graphics this would be the one.

Featuring support of all AMD’s socket 939 Athlon 64 CPUs this motherboard was able to run our FX-60 processor with no problems at all. It has 2 DDR400 DIMM slots, 1 PCI-Express x16, 3 PCI slots, integrated audio, and supports 2000 MT/s FSB speeds and Ultra DMA 66/100/133. We filled the 2 DDR400 memory slots with 1GB Corsair PC-3200 memory modules for a combined total of 2GB at CL2.5 timings and the board was stable. The High-quality 6-channel audio was impressive for a sub $60 board. This is all thanks to the Realtek ALC655 CODEC, which is a 16-bit, full-duplex AC’97 Rev. 2.3 compatible six-channel audio CODEC designed for PC multimedia systems like this one.

The ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 chipset found on this board ran our test system with no problems and other than the normal issues found on a budget board (lack of BIOS settings like memory timings and few voltage options) it performed better than we expected. The ECS RS482-M can be had for $57.99 and while we give the board a thumbs up. I’d also like to thank ECS USA for sending us this motherboard to use in our benchmarking for this article. They knew what we were doing and that the gaming performance would be far below the PCI Express video cards. Companies like ECS support the enthusiast community in a number of ways and this is one of them!