Tweaking the chipset, and Gigabyte’s GA-M69GM-S2H

Tuning AMD-690

Obviously AMD has already established a pretty solid baseline for their 690 chipset, and as such, the tweaks AMD have recently implemented into 690 have been designed to enhance the core product, not redesign it.

In other words, today’s 690 chips that are rolling off the production line are identical to the ones shipping earlier this year: AMD has made no changes to the design of the chipset, nor has the manufacturing process changed in any way. All of the improvements AMD has come up with have been at the software level, the hardware itself is unchanged. So what kind of improvements are we talking about?

For starters AMD has been able to tune the IGP driver to deliver enhanced graphics performance. The exact performance improvements vary depending on the app being tested, for instance AMD press material claims a 6% performance improvement in 3DMark 06, and a whopping 35% improvement in Doom 3.

Besides the IGP driver, other portions of the chipset driver have been tweaked to deliver enhanced performance to the system as a whole. For instance, tweaks been made to improve memory performance.

Besides driver enhancements, AMD has also improved the 690 chipset’s overclocking headroom via BIOS development. AMD has been working with motherboard manufacturers on providing more robust tuning options inside BIOS that are designed to deliver finer control of the HyperTransport bus. As a result, HyperTransport speeds approaching 300MHz shouldn’t be uncommon for a micro-ATX board that’s been properly tuned: that’s pretty impressive for an IGP motherboard.

Another option motherboard manufacturers can expose in newer BIOS releases is IGP overclocking.

Unfortunately, unlike the driver improvements (which deliver a universal performance improvement to all AMD-690 motherboards), the BIOS enhancements are up to the discretion of the motherboard manufacturer. Some manufacturers may choose to expose full overclocking functionality on their 690 motherboards, or none at all. AMD doesn’t control any aspects when it comes to this, just as Intel doesn’t with motherboards based on their chipsets.

Fortunately the Gigabyte GA-M69GM-S2H motherboard we’re looking at today does provide enough BIOS options for us to get our feet a little wet when it comes to overclocking, but more on that later, let’s take a look at the board itself.

The Gigabyte GA-M69GM-S2H Motherboard

As we discussed on the previous page, the feature that really separates Gigabyte’s GA-M69GM-S2H from other AMD-690 motherboards is its display connectivity. Not only does the motherboard feature DVI and VGA outputs on the back plane of the motherboard, you’ll also find an HDMI connection as well. This gives you the full gamut of display options supported by the AMD-690 chipset natively right on the back of the motherboard.

There are other AMD-690 motherboards with out-of-the-box support for all three display options, but most of these other motherboards require the use of riser cards to get all three display outputs (usually its an HDMI riser card). This is less than ideal, as you must plug the riser card in your motherboard’s PCI Express graphics slot in order to get full functionality. You can also see the S/PDIF audio output right next to the HDMI output.