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

Sapphire?s board is also based on the AMD 690G + SB600 chipset, and the dimensions of the board are the same, so it fits into all SFF cases. The difference when compared to the MSI is the existence of 4 DIMM slots, so up to 8 GB of DDR2 800MHz memory can be used. We are a hundred percent sure that no user will have this amount of memory on this board, but the 4 slots give you an option to upgrade later without the need to get rid of your old modules. It also raises the price of the board, so we will not take the 4 DIMMs either as a positive or negative thing. This board supports HDMI, so it can be a good base for building a Home Theater PC system that will connect to the new flat panel displays with HDMI support.

When we are reviewing multimedia components, features are much more important than sheer performance. Nevertheless, we ran our standard series of benchmarks to see if someone has the edge in performance.

We assembled a system with the following components:

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
- OCZ DDR2 PC8000 2x1GB @ DDR2 800MHz 4-4-4-12
- Western Digital RaptorX 150GB
- OCZ GameXstream 700W

So, let's check out how these boards perform.