Conclusion

EQS

When we first received the EQS 690G it was hard not to feel a little underwhelmed. The box is unattractive and the bundle itself barely covers the minimum requirements. This continued to be disappointing with the lack of any FireWire connectivity, in 2007 firewire is a must have for a media based system.

Additionally there is no optical out which most surround sound systems support. On a more positive note, there is the potential for a number of USB brackets to be added as well as some first class display options. With standard TV, HDTV or conventional PC monitor support, there is an output to cater for all. It was also excellent to see some thought being given to the layout of the board with the main drive connectors being far enough away from the PCIe 16x slot and close to the edge of the board.

Despite the less than promising bundle, we are more concerned with performance. There were some areas when we craved more power, such as when running our "real world" Photoshop testing suite, however if we focus on memory bandwidth, gaming and video encoding, the product delivers.

Before we move on to the next product we have one further observation, this is the performance in High Definition video acceleration. This is an area where the 690G based products have performed badly since release and in the past week or so AMD have announced a BIOS update to improve performance. While it is always great to receive upgraded performance it seems to us that AMD and their partners have been selling boards which were not feature complete at launch. This is a dangerous game to play and hopefully this does not become a normal occurrence in the future.

What do these awards mean?

EQS 690G is available for £46 inc vat from YOYOtech

 

Abit

Unpacking the AN-M2HD for the first time gave us a few surprises. Starting with the rather cheesy feminine styled box we were then greeted by the fact the microATX board was enclosed in an ATX sized box. Negatives aside, we found a great addition to the standard motherboard bundle, a free HDMI>DVI cable. Connectivity options were the next positive with the ability to add more than 10 USB ports to the board as well as three FireWire devices. The great list of connectors continues with HDMI, VGA and optical out however we were a little disappointed to see that people with older TV's are not catered for.

A real plus with the AN-M2HD are the configuration options available within the BIOS, while many of the CPU/memory ranges are similar to that on the EQS board, the voltages available on Abit's product are much higher which allowed us to push our components closer to their limits. Overall performance of the board was very good and there were areas where Abit/Nvidia have things spot on, such as video acceleration which works flawlessly, even on 1080p content. There were also good showings in desktop tasks such as Photoshop use. Where the board does suffer a little is in gaming performance. A small increase in performance has occurred over the previous generation of Nvidia based chipsets however this was not enough to take the AN-M2HD up to the level of the EQS product. In the next refresh it would be good to see Nvidia add a couple more pipelines to their on-board graphics to make them more competitive in this area.

What do these awards mean?

Abit AN-M2HD is available for £54 inc vat from ARIA