EQS AB1S-RS690MKM

There is not a lot to say about EQS’s packaging, it is a generic box with a sticker (badly) attached to the front specifying the contents. On the back of the box we have an RMA voucher and that is it.

The bundle is interesting, firstly we have the inclusion of a video bracket featuring composite and s-video out, there is also a serial connector bracket which really could have been omitted for cost saving purposes. The manual is in-depth and packed with useful information for any novice system builder, that said specific areas have glaring omissions such as the LED signals. There are two LEDs on the board and the manual explains that one is lit red when the board is receiving power and one is lit green when the board is on. What was not explained was what flashing red meant and we saw that on one test configuration we tried.

The EQS AB1S-RS690MKM is absolutely jam packed with features and components. One down side of the board is the placement of the 1x PCIe slot below the 16x slot, however this really is our only complaint and every other aspect is well thought out (It is also worth noting that the PCIe 1x slot placement is the same on Abit’s AN-M2HD). The drive connectors are all very close to the edge of the board meaning that we do not have cables in the way of access to slots or jumpers, additionally it makes cable routing easier resulting in a tidier case with better airflow. Like the Abit board there are also four memory slots rather than two as seen on most microATX boards. This increases the maximum memory support up to 8 GB of DDR2-800 in dual channel mode.

Connectivity options on the EQS board is similar to that of the Abit, including the onboard HDMI (via an 80nm X700/X1250 based with 4 pixel pipelines and 2 vertex shaders), with the only notable difference in connectivity between the AN-M2HD and this being the omission of optical audio out and a FireWire port. Disappointingly this means that there is absolutely no FireWire connectivity present, and no onboard connectors with which to add a bracket. This completely contradicts the information on the EQS site. (The jumper locations are on the board however they are not populated with pins).

AwardBIOS is used and we have the standard main menu layout. More notable configuration options are the ability to change the memory timings and IGP shared memory size. CPU (1.45v), chipset and Memory voltage (up to 2.1v) are also configurable. For the CPU overclockers out there we have a plenty of settings which allow us to overclock HTT and CPU multiplier on unlocked CPU’s. There are a large number of multipliers available in the options which go as high as 25x and on HTT the choices run from 200 to 440 MHz.