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| Overclocking Results: |
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MicroATX motherboards
are not intended to be overclocked heavily, and as such most manufacturers
include little to no overclocking support with them. There are a few
overclocking options in the ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard BIOS, so let's explore
how high we can push things. Using an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processor and set of
Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C3 memory, the board had the gear to go far.... if it
can.
Starting at 200 MHz the ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard
easily overclocked to its maximum speed of 232 MHz. That was achieved without
adjusting the voltage options. It would have been nice if ECS allowed the
motherboard to go further. Considering the intended workstation purpose
overclocking really isn't a practical demand in this situation.
The ECS BIOS:
Not exactly the most user friendly memory
timing options... the options are also missing are the usual CAS Latency,
RAS to CAS and Row Precharge options. If you're tweaking the BIOS, make
sure you know where the Clear CMOS jumper is.
You can adjust the onboard frame buffer
between 32-512MB, remember though while the high number may sound nice it does
steal the memory from your system. You can also adjust things like the Graphics
clock speed but that's best left at stock as you wouldn't get much of a benefit
anyway. You can choose the video output standards depending on where in
the world you live.
Prelude to Benchmarks
With the AMD 690G chipset being Microsoft Windows Vista
ready, PCSTATS will be testing the ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard in Windows Vista
32 bit. Consequently there are slightly less benchmarks than we would normally
have for a WindowsXP based test system because benchmark compatibility with
Vista is still finding its feet. To reiterate, the benchmark results on the
following pages were all conducted within Microsoft
Vista Ultimate.
The details of how the ECS AMD690GM-M2 motherboard test
system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers,
operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In the second column
are the general specs for the reference platforms this AMD 690G based
motherboard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS
test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results
on the next page.
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| PCSTATS Test System Configurations |
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