The AMD 690G chipset is built on TSMC's 80nm manufacturing process. Even though AMD has its own fabrication plants, AMD stuck with ATi's old manufacturing partners for making these motherboard chipsets which was previously known as the ATI RS690.

The AMD 690G is designed with Microsoft Windows Vista in mind, specifically for Vista's AeroGlass feature. The chipset supports all of AMD's 32-bit and 64-bit Socket AM2 processors.

It's the integrated video capabilities that really make the AMD 690G chipset special.

The onboard Radeon Xpress 1250 videocard is fully DirectX 9.0 compatible (thus compatible with AeroGlass) and is based on the Radeon X700 architecture, albeit with four rendering pipelines. That should give AMD a 3D performance advantage over comparable integrated nVIDIA graphics cards like the GeForce 6100 series. At least it does on paper. The integrated videocard supports one TV output DAC for TV output and HDCP natively (something the GeForce 6100 series doesn't) through DVI and HDMI. That means the AMD 690G is a better Home Theatre PC solution if the motherboard manufacturer chooses to implement these options.

The onboard Radeon Xpress 1250 videocard supports dual monitors (one digital and one analog display). If you want to run dual monitors, one will have to be analog and the second digital, DVI to analog converters do not work with the Radeon Xpress 1250, so you cannot connect two analog monitors onto the onboard videocard.

Should you want to use a stand alone videocard, the AMD 690G supports a PCI Express x16 slot, however when a stand alone videocard is used the onboard is disabled. The Radeon Xpress 1250 videocard also shares up to 512MB of installed system memory. The AMD SB600 Southbridge incorporates four Serial ATA II ports and a single Ultra/133 IDE controller. Also integrated in are ten USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit MAC and a 7.1 channel High Definition audio controller.

On paper AMD's 690G chipset is a real challenger to nVIDIA's GeForce 6100 family of chipsets, but whether it is truly faster and a good alternative is something we'll find out shortly... it all depends on how the benchmarks go. First, a closer look at the ECS AMD690GM-M2 AMD motherboard highlights.