AMD 690 chipset (cont’d)

Radeon X1250 Graphics

Handling graphics duties inside the 690 chipset is the Radeon X1250. As we mentioned previously, this is an all-new chip which is largely based on ATI’s RV410 GPU used in the Radeon X700 family on the desktop.

AMD has made a few tweaks here and there though. For instance, AMD’s Radeon X1250 has 4 pipelines, with 4 texture units and 4 pixel shaders running at 400MHz. The GPU has no vertex shaders though, instead vertex shading is handled by the CPU.

One feature Radeon X1250 boasts that isn’t found in any X700 though is the addition of HDMI 1.3. The chip is also fully compliant with HDCP. The chip natively supports dual digital displays, and with the addition of a Radeon graphics card, a 690 system can drive up to four displays simultaneously thanks to Surroundview.

Another item we should note is that AMD 690 boasts dual-link DVI support. This means that you can run resolutions as high as 2560x1600, which is the native res of 30” LCDs like the Dell 3007WFP. We tested this out with the ASUS M2A-VM and can report that 2560x1600 ran flawlessly on the Dell panel.

AMD 690 also supports two digital outputs, so the chipset could drive both a DVI and HDMI display with the proper motherboard.

The rest of the chipset

AMD outfits the 690 chipset with 24 PCI Express lanes. 16 lanes are devoted for the PCI Express graphics slot, while an additional four lanes are available for expansion slots and/or components integrated on the motherboard (audio, LAN, RAID, etc). The final four lanes are used for the A-Link II connection, which links the 690 North Bridge with the SB600 South Bridge chip.

Here we should also note that AMD has two SKUs planned for the AMD 690 series: the AMD 690G and the 690V. Both chipsets both very similar features, including the same Radeon X1250 graphics core running at 400MHz. The only difference is that the 690G supports DVI/HDMI with HDCP, whereas the 690V lacks support for DVI and HDMI.

The motherboards

Already we’ve received AMD 690 motherboards from ASUS and MSI, the M2A-VM from ASUS and MSI’s K9AGM2.

For a micro-ATX motherboard, the M2A-VM boasts a wide range of options for overclocking, including bus speeds up to 400MHz in 1MHz increments and CPU voltage options up to 1.550V in BIOS (in 0.025V increments) and DDR voltages up to 2.1V (you can also adjust the chipset voltage), while you can find DVI and VGA connections on the motherboard’s back plane. The board also supports HDMI via an external riser card that sits in the PCI Express graphics slot.


MSI’s M2A-VM is notable due to its diminutive size – it’s so small it looks like it’s ready for use right now in one of MSI’s Mega PCs or any other small form factor system. Unfortunately due to its small size you lose two DIMMs, but all four SATA ports are still present, as well as two PCI slots, and x1 PCIe slot, and a PCI Express graphics slot. The M2A-VM also has an HDMI output located on the back plane of the motherboard, so you don’t need an external riser card to get that feature. MSI provides no options for overclocking in the M2A-VM’s BIOS

Both of these motherboards are expected to hit retail shortly, and should cost around $80 according to AMD. At that price, the 690 chipset is comparable to NVIDIA’s GeForce 6150 and about $40 cheaper than Intel’s G965 integrated platform. We’ll be testing all three chipsets in this article to see how the platforms stack up against each other.