ECS AMD690GM-M2 is the second mATX board that arrived at our labs during the Chinese New Year period. We spent time with the board is pleased with its performance. In our test, we also compared the board to other integrated graphics performance from NVIDIA, SIS and ATI RS485.

The 3D performance of the integrated core seems to have surpassed most of the other intergrated chipsets in the market. When overclocked, we see almost a 8% gain in GPU performance which definitely boost the 3D performance to another level. Most importantly, both the north and south bridges are all passsively cooled. This makes it an ideal choice for users who love to tweak as you could just pair them off with normal coolers instead of heatpipes or other more expensive coolers.

In terms of USB and SATA II perforamance, they are all governed by the South bridge SB600. As we can see from previous test of the SB600 in the EPoX 690G board, the performance surpasses most of the competiting chipsets. PCmark05 score also improved. When paired with an external graphics card, the results are quite similar to most chipsets.

In terms of features, the board is very similar to the EPoX which we reviewed earlier. The only major difference that this board only support 2 DIMM slots. Again, there is no 1394 support on this board. The SATA II ports support RAID 0,1,0+1. On its right is 4 DDR2 DIMM slots supporting up to 16 GB of memory runing in Dual Channel. The back panel consists of PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse, 4 USB ports, 1 VGA, 1 DVI, 1 x GbE LAN port and 8 ch audio.  There is no S/PDIF.

In terms of image quality, HQV test reveals that 690G does not support 3:2 pulldown. This is in fact a let down as it is useful for fast motion images. The SiS 771 seems to do a better job in this area.

Overclocking wise, the board has no issues running at 230x10. The BIOS seems to be too restrictive in the selection options. The GPU CLK adjustment probably needs some changes in the coding to get ti working properly.seems to be able to boot up to 250MHz.

Overall, the ECS AMD690GM-M2 will be the excellent choice for System integrators that intends to make small form factor machines pairing it up with VISTA Ultimate with tv tuner card. I hope that future drivers will improve on the image quality.

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Pros

• 7.1 HD audio
• GbE
• Good USB performance
• Integrated 3D performance is good

Cons

• 3D performance
• BIOS too limited
• No 1394
• No S/PDIF

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.