Feature Articles

AMD 690G IGP First Looks and Performance

By Zachary Chan - 28 Feb 2007

Test Setup

Test Setup

To get a first look at where the new 690G stands in terms of onboard graphics performance, we compared the ECS AMD690GM-M2 with the ECS RS485M-M, its Radeon Xpress 1100 predecessor and a Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA, which is a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 board. These two chipsets are among the two main IGPs for the AMD platform.

As with our proper reviews, we try to match hardware capabilities to achieve comparable performance numbers, but because of the discrepancies between the different chipsets, platforms and the hardware limitations of the AMD690GM-M2 motherboard however, these benchmarks are only a rough estimation on where the AMD 690G stands.

Due to limited time, GPU limitations and the hardware discrepancies mentioned, we've limited our benchmarking to the few gaming benchmarks that stress the graphics capabilities only. As we obtain retail-ready motherboards, we will conduct our usual comprehensive performance review. For this article, we've run Unreal Tournament 2004, Command and Conquer:Generals and 3DMark05.

The following list shows the hardware setup used to benchmark the ECS AMD690GM-M2, ECS RS485M-M and Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA:-

  • ECS AMD690GM-M2 and ECS RS485M-M
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (Socket AM2, 2 x 512KB L2) @ 2.0GHz (10x200MHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 15-5-5 CAS 5.0
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ATI Radeon X1250 IGP 128MB/256MB UMA frame butter with HyperMemory (ECS AMD690GM-M2 only)
  • ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP 128MB UMA frame butter with HyperMemory (ECS RS485M-M only)
  • ATI Catalyst 7.2 package
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
  • Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA
  • AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (Socket 939, 2 x 1MB L2) @ 1.8GHz (9x200MHz)
  • 4 x 512MB Kingston HyperX DDR-400 @ 6-3-3 CAS 2.5
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • GeForce 6150 IGP 128MB UMA frame buffer with TurboCache
  • NVIDIA ForceWare 93.71
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

Before we go into the actual benchmarks, here are a few extra points that users need to note on why we've used certain configurations.

  • The Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA is a Socket 939 motherboard and not an AM2 board. This board was used because at time of writing, we did not have a comparable GeForce 6150 board for the AM2 platform.
  • The AM2 Athlon 64 X2 5000+ has been down-clocked to 2GHz to match the anomaly in the AMD690GM-M2.
  • The 939 Athlon 64 FX-60 has also been down-clocked to match its AM2 counterpart for this review. Since the FX-60 has a total of 2MB cache, we reduced its speed to 1.8GHz in order to match the 2GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+ that has a total of 1MB L2 cache. For the purpose of our graphics comparison, we've in our older reviews verified that this sort of 'CPU performance' matching holds true whereby a 200MHz clock speed deficit of an AMD dual-core 2MB L2 cache CPU is equivalent to an AMD dual-core 1MB L2 cache CPU.

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