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AMD 690 Chipset
We'd like to thank Foxconn for providing us with their MCP61SM2MA motherboard for testing purposes on such short notice.
Introduction Today, AMD is announcing their first proprietary chipset: the RS690. Already many manufacturers are lined up to produce boards with this entry-level, mainstream chipset, and with good reason. The budget-centric mATX market is big and growing, and the NVIDIA 6100-series chipset is a little long in the tooth. To boot, these small boards are very popular with the home theater crowd, as they promise lower power requirements and along with it, super-silent passive cooling. The competition's chipsets are no graphics power-houses, and AMD wants the RS690 to win out in all categories; they've got two aces to play: onboard video provided by a re-branded X700 core, and a dedicated hardware video accelerator. Together they make up the X1200 and X1250 with Avivo Technology. Over a year after the release of NVIDIA's 6100 chipsets, AMD has no excuse for being out-performed or even matched by NVIDIA's older chipset, especially with their new in-house chipset developers. We've got an ASUS M2A-VM in our hands, so let's see how it stacks up. About the RS690 From a distance, there's not much that separates this new chipset from other mainstream chipsets. It doesn't support new specifications like PCI-Express 2.0, it doesn't completely do away with legacy connections, and it doesn't use AMD's new DTX layout. It does support HDCP and some manufacturers are including HDMI jacks (DVI is standard), although that's less revolutionary than evolutionary. In other words, AMD would be stupid not to include it. The two versions, 690G (X1250 graphics) and 690V (X1200 graphics) are functionally identical, only the 690G has an HDMI jack in place of the 690V's VGA jack.  What it does do is graphics, specifically video acceleration. Avivo, like NVIDIA's PureVideo, isn't all buzzword. These video acceleration technologies make a difference, even to the untrained eye. Watching a DVD without hardware video acceleration can be outright uncomfortable, with bad progressive scanning that makes the footage jump, scan lines stick around, and audio that doesn't match up with the video. The RS690 is different because it has dedicated video acceleration, and promises to deliver first-class high-definition bliss. Additionally, the X700 was no slouch, and it's reincarnation into the X1200 graphics core makes it a solid Vista Ready backbone. If the chipset is cheap enough to take over mainstream markets (along with rock-bottom prices on AM2 processors) and the graphics powerful enough to run home theater PCs out-of-the-box, without a discrete video card, then AMD will continue to take ground away from Intel. Which is precisely what RS690 intends to do.
Page 1: Introduction, About the RS690
Page 2: Board Layout, Bundle & Extras Page 3: General Benchmarks Page 4: Graphics Benchmarks, Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion 
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