CeBIT Head to head: MSI 690G vs. Sapphire Pure 690G
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 19 Mar 2007

Although reviewing low end components doesn't sound as attractive as doing the top of the line products, the fact is that low end is what sells the most and what keeps the companies revenues up. AMD's new chipset, the 690G is designed for that part of the market. Both of these boards have a combination of that northbridge and an SB600 southbridge. This might or might not be as interesting as a lot of our other articles, but still - many computers out there have integrated motherboards...

First, let's take a look at the MSI board. The K9AGM2 is a small form factor motherboard with integrated graphics, built around the AMD 690G + SB600 chipset. It supports AMD's AM2 CPUs, a 1000 MHz HTT bus and up to 4 GB of 800 MHz memory in the two DIMM slots. Although you might think that not having 4 DIMM slots is a disadvantage, keep in mind that the main goal for this segment of the market is price, and that 4 DIMM slots would raise the price of the board. It is very doubtful that any user of this board will ever have the need for more than 2 GB of memory, let alone 4 of them. The backpanel has more or less the usual connectors, including PS/2, parallel, RJ-45, USB2.0 and audio connectors. Because this is an integrated board, it also has a D-SUB connector for an analog monitor. The most interesting connector is the HDMI, which supports transferring both video and audio over a single cable, intended for HTPC (Home Theater PC) use. It can transfer uncompressed video, and multi channel audio. This board has a 7.1 audio subsystem powered by the Realtek ALC888 chip, compatible with Azalia. Unfortunately, here at CeBIT in Hanover we didn?t have an HDMI capable screen, so we used a regular PC monitor.