System setup and notes
The ASUS M2A-VM HDMI and Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD find themselves going up against the ASUS M2NPV-VM - the same board with which we originally compared the EQS AB1S-RS690MKM.
This centres on NVIDIA's nForce 430/6150 chipset and lacks some of the more desirable features offered by AMD 690G motherboards, such as support for HDMI and HDCP, but is a close competitor.
However, the nForce 430 has been around for quite some time, so a replacement should be arriving in the near future, bringing feature-parity with the AMD 690G.
| Motherboard | ASUS M2A-VM HDMI | Sapphire PI-AM2RS690MHD | ASUS M2NPV-VM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz, 2 x 512KiB L2 cache, 200MHz HTT, Socket AM2) | |||
| Memory | 1GiB (2 x 512) OCZ PC5400 | |||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-15 1T @ DDR2-628.6 | 4-4-4-8 1T @ DDR2-628.6 | 4-4-4-8 1T @ DDR2-631.4 | |
| Graphics card(s) | Radeon Xpress 1250 IGP (401/500) | GeForce 6150 TurboCache IGP (475/667) | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |||
| BIOS revision | 0502 (03/29/2007) | Version 2K070211A (02/11/2007) | 0504 (17/12/2006) | |
| Mainboard software | CATALYST 7.1 | NVIDIA 8.26 | ||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 7.2 Beta | NVIDIA ForceWare 93.71 | ||
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional 32-bit with SP2 | |||
| PSU | FSP 300-60THN-P(PF) 300W | |||
| Monitor | Dell 2405FPW | |||
Software
| 2D Benchmarks | SiSoft SANDRA Float Memory Bandwidth ScienceMark Memory Latency HEXUS Pifast calculation to 10M places HEXUS WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding CINEBENCH 2003 v9.5 HDTach RW v3.0.1.0 |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks | Far Cry v1.33 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
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Testing notes
Due to the particular multiplier of the CPU and limited memory-ratios on AM2 CPUs, the DDR2-667 was limited to running at DDR2-629 speed.
Additionally, the ASUS M2A-VM HDMI board had no options for adjusting memory-timings in the BIOS. Because of this, we were forced to run the ASUS at 4-4-4-15 1T, rather than the 4-4-4-8 1T of the other boards.
