X-bit labs

First Look at AMD 690G Chipset: ECS AMD690GM-M2 Mainboard Preview (page 4)

Category: Chipsets

by Kirill "ALT-F13" Balalin

[ 03/02/2007 | 02:07 PM ]

ECS AMD690GM-M2: PCB Design and Functionality

The mainboard is designed in MicroATX form-factor. All components are placed quite conveniently. Although there is one thing that has already become typical of the ECS boards: the additional 4-pin power supply connector is almost in the middle of the PCB.

Two of the four DDR2 slots haven’t been laid out and this is pretty surprising, I should say. The chipset microchips are covered with tiny black heatsinks, however they are more than enough thanks to minimal power consumption of the new AMD 690G. Even under long-term 3D workload, they heat up only a little bit higher than the room temperature.

The expansion slots selection is optimal for a MicroATX mainboard: there is one PCI Express x16 and one PCI-Express x1 slot, and two PCI slots.

The layout of the mainboard back panel is quite standard, except for the two monitor connectors – DVI and VGA. Unfortunately, the budget ECS AMD690GM-M2 doesn’t feature the HDMI Out.

The CPU voltage regulator corresponds to the class of the product we are talking about. Nevertheless, when we ran the tests with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor working at 3GHz speed, we didn’t reveal any problems.