Asus launches AMD 690G motherboard

YOU'VE GOT TO HAND it to the lads at Asustek's marketing department. They pre-launched RS690 (Mobility Radeon X2300) and R630 (Mobility Radeon X2600) mobile parts earlier in the week, and now have released all the details of long-delayed 690G chipset.

The M2A-VM motherboard comes with a "AMD 690G" North Bridge and old acquaintance ATI SB600 South Bridge chips. The official name of integrated graphics inside 690G is "ATi Radeon X1250", supporting sharing of max. 256MB of system memory. You can have maximum of 8GB of system memory (if you use 2GB DIMMs), but realistically speaking, you should be targeting as fast memory as possible, since integrated graphics needs bandwidth the most.

Tiny heatsink on the 690G chip only confirms that this is a notebook design and that it won't heat up the computer at all...

The graphics will show the picture using both DVI-D and analogue D-SUB connectors. The board supports multi-monitors, but the DVI-D connector cannot be converted to analogue, so no DVI-to-D-SUB connector can help you out.

The expansion slots are single PCIe x16 and x1, followed by two PCI ones. Storage is deployed with four S-ATA 3Gb/s connectors (RAID0, 1 and 10 are supported) and a single parallel UATA-100/133 connector.

Gigabit LAN is mandatory on every motherboard that comes out these days, and Asus opted for a PCIe based chip. Audio is on the other hand, fully compliant with DRM-malware functions of Windows Vista, and is based on RealTek ALC883 HD codec. If you want, you can connect up to 10 USB 2.0 devices, with four of those being installed on rear end of the board, and three additional headers will take care of the rest. µ