Usually, we will just post benchmarks of the boards we tested. This time round, we are holding on to the results as drivers are not final. The test set up uses a X2 4000+ with 2GB of Corsair DDR2-800 CAS 5 memory.

In our days of test run, the board has been stable and working very well. The usual tests we threw at it work flawlessly despite having a very early BIOS and beta drivers. All tests were done using the integrated video with driver 14.03 while the AMD 690G uses Catalyst 7.3.

As you know this chipset integrates a DX9c graphics  core with SM3.0. The AMD 690G does not come with SM3.0 support. This might give the MCP68 chipset a big boost when applications/benchmarks that takes advantage of that.

Benchmarks like FEAR gave similar results too. DOOM3 on the other hand has a 60% higher in 640x480 compared to the AMD 690G boards. At 1024x768, it scored 17% higher than the AMD 690G.

In terms of video quality, the chipset with current beta drivers yields pretty good image quality. In our usual HQV test in WinDVD 8 with hardware acceleration ON, the image quality is comparable to standalone video cards. Cadence & 3:2 pull down does not seem to be working. Little or no jaggies were spotted in most tests. This early test gave us a score of 55 points which is still a bit behind the SIS 771.

In a seperate test on the playing back H.264 AVC clip using PowerDVD 7, we see that the CPU utilisation shot up to above 90%. Disabling or Enabling the Hardware acceleration tab didn't help. Looks like the 1920x1080 TS is too demanding. Actually, It came as no surprise as the driver is not ready as yet. Secondly 7050PV/6309A only supports PureVideo and not PureVideo HD. It supports mpeg2 playback. For AVC, it can support up to 1080i. As for H.264 it supports up to 720p.

Back to the EPoX EP-AP68P/G, this board exhibits the excellent quality we have been getting all this while. The passive heatsink, the DEBUG LED, Power Sw/Reset Sw, Ghost BIOS, temperature monitoring are just some of the good features other than what the chipset offers. As the board uses a D-SUB + DVI-D, you might want to consider getting the optional HDMI card to output the quality video to your large screen LCD TV.

For those who loves overclocking, there are vast amount of overclocking options available in the BIOS. It is up to individual to explore it. At this moment, anything that we change in the FSB results in reset back to the defaults. Looks like the BIOS has some issues during o/c.