Verdict: Too fussy about its power supply for use in a reliable media PC.
With Socket AM2+ and the 790 chipset coming shortly, and considering the strength of Intel Core 2 Duo and the P35 or X38 chipset, you might be looking to retire your Socket AM2 CPU pretty soon. However, rather than chuck it on eBay and wonder at the lack of bids you receive, you could build a media centre PC with it. This board has integrated HDMI and is micro-ATX-sized, so it will fit in small cases.
The board uses the AMD 690G chipset, an underused chip that seems destined only for media centre PCs. This is probably a consequence of its release date, as the chip is pretty good. We first saw the AMD 690 in the MSI K9AGM2-FIH, more than ten months after Core 2 Duo had regained the performance lead for Intel. Compound that with the decision by AMD to talk openly about Socket AM2+ months before the launch of the 690 (the Wikipedia page went up on 18 December 2006, a good five months before Issue 46 went on sale), and you can see why. Want a product that's slower and will be quickly outdated? No?
This is a shame, as the AMD 690G has a lot going for it. Firstly, it's a cheap chip to buy, as both the boards we've seen have been a few quid shy of £50. And it's packed with stuff too. There's a Radeon X1250 GPU inside, which is fine for displaying a desktop - even a 3D-accelerated one such as Vista Home Premium. There's also HDCP, and it can output video over HDMI.
EQS has implemented the chip well, with both the 4-pin and 24-pin power sockets pushed to the edges, unlike the MSI, which positions the 4-pin socket dead centre, resulting in untidy cabling. The clips for the CPU cooler are orientated so that your CPU cooler blows air to the side of the case (if it blows it in any particular direction, that is); this will help with efficient air venting in cases such as the Antec Fusion, which exhausts from the right-hand side. EQS also uses a small heatsink on the SB600 Southbridge, unlike the MSI, on which the chip is perilously naked, and provides four memory slots, rather than the two of the MSI. However, the MSI board includes a FireWire controller.
Both boards have sensibly arranged drive connectors towards the front of the board (four S-ATA, one EIDE and one floppy), and the same number of expansion slots: two PCI, one 1x PCI-E and one 16x PCI-E. The latter could house a graphics card, which would help with HD video playback, or a 1x PCI-E expansion card. This doesn't need to be a sound card, as the 8-channel on-board Realtek ALC888 can handle protected soundtracks, since it's HDCP-compliant.
The boxed extras are a strange mix, with backplates for S-Video and composite, and serial (so you can connect a pre-millennium external modem to your sleek set-top box, we presume). There are no USB backplates, but the three USB headers will be handy for your case's front panel and USB infrared receiver. There's no S/PDIF, although there's an HDMI header that could be used to connect the PC directly to both the amp and telly.
For testing, we updated our AMD test CPU to the 3.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition, so that we're using a test chip (on price, at least) that's roughly comparable to the Core 2 Duo E6750 we use to test LGA775 motherboards. When we tested this CPU last month, we used an nForce 590 SLI board; this was faster in the GIMP test (959 compared to 935), but slower in the multitasking test (726 compared to 760), while both boards were identical in the video encoding test. The improved performance in multitasking is pertinent, as the test is largely based around massive hard disk reads and writes while playing an HD video - not unlike recording a TV show while watching another, although more stressful. The BIOS offers full overclocking control, although perhaps the ability to drop the multiplier of your CPU is most useful to a quiet media centre. It managed to run the Black Edition CPU at its air-cooled maximum of 3.36GHz with a 210MHz FSB and a 1.45V vcore.
However, this board was fussy about its power supply, not booting with one and then refusing to wake up from sleep when we used the Antec Quaddro 850W. This is far from ideal for a media centre PC, in which waking up to record a programme and shutting down afterwards is crucial.
Conclusion
The AMD 690 and SB600 Southbridge is clearly a competent pairing for a media centre PC, and EQS implements it better than MSI managed five months ago. However, it's too fussy about the power supply, which means it is not suited to running a media PC.
