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Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

AMD likes four

A couple of months ago we reviewed AMD’s 4x4, possibly the most powerful machine that one can still call a PC. Now AMD has brought out the RS690 chipset, and among its many features the one that caught my eye (no pun intended) is the ability to drive four displays—another four for AMD.

There have been a lot of IGPs in the market, and all of them, up until now (at least as far as we know) shut off the IGP’s GPU when an AIB is plugged into the PCIe slot.

AMD changed the rules, in many ways, with this new part. First off, it has not one but two display outputs, a VGA and a DVI. And if you plug in a graphics AIB, and most of them come with two display-outs now, the IGP’s graphics stay active thereby giving you four displays out of one PC.

The chipset is really feature rich, and in addition to offering dual-display output directly it also provides an HDMI, with HDCP and audio output.

This is one packed-full, robust chipset that we think the OEMs are going to love because of all the SKUs they can make out of it.

Figure 1. Four on the desktop. (Source: AMD)	Figure 2. AMD’s R690G/SB600 chipset. (Source: AMD)

A packaged deal

As you probably know, Intel gave AMD a price whippin’ and sent AMD’s margins into a tailspin. But AMD’s comeback punch is a bundled deal: chipset and CPU (and why not, Intel’s been doing it for years). So AMD says an Intel g965-based mobo and an E6400 2 Duo 2.13-GHz set will cost $345, whereas an Athlon X2 5200+ at 2.4 GHz and a R690g mobo will only set you back $315, and presumably give you a better system. We haven’t heard what Intel thinks about this, but I’d bet they’ve got their own set of numbers.

And how did it work?

Well now, there’s a long story we won’t tell. Getting Vista loaded was in itself a chore; it took us five drives to get one it would tolerate. And then it could only find half of it; a mysterious fifth dimension sector has gone missing it seems.

Our first attempts at getting the IGP to run with the AIB was fruitless. On the positive side, we did get the IGP to drive a 1600 x 1200 monitor, however.

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