AMD's 690G vs Intel's 965G head-to-head - Testing setup, details
Author: Grga Curkovic
Date: 28 Feb 2007

We got our hands on a board from ASUS, the M2A-VM. It?s a mini-ATX board based on AMD 690V chipset with SB600 southbridge. Since we mostly test high end parts, we were not impressed with the board, what is impressive is the low price. The bundle is minimal, according to the price. We used the provided AMD Athlon 5200+ we got with the board and assembled the testbed using our standard components, the OCZ SLI-Ready DDR2-8500 modules, Western Digital RaptorX and Corsair 620W power supply unit. We decided to compare it to its direct competition from Intel so we assembled another machine based on ASUS? board based on Intel 965G chipset and Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 that shared the other components with the AMD machine.

Doing things this way actually means being as fair as possible towards the end user because the price is very close, which is the whole point of these products. If you consider the price of these two systems, the conclusion is very simple - AMD/ATi's platform is some ?50 cheaper. We should absolutely keep this in mind because it might turn out to be the most important piece of information in this review.