Abit AN-M2 Motherboard Review

3D Performance: Quake III

We used the demo four available on version 1.32 of Quake III to make our benchmarking with this game. We ran this demo three times at 1024x768x32 resolution and all image quality settings on their default configuration and we picked the middle value for our comparisons, i.e., we discarded the highest and the lowest values.

We didn’t use Quake 4 because with its latest patch installed (1.4.2 when this review was published) it complained that it couldn’t be run on AMD 690G.

You can check the results of our benchmarking below. All the listed video cards were installed on Abit AN-M2.

Here Abit AN-M2 achieved the best performance among all motherboards with on-board video we included in our comparison: it was 21.01% faster than ECS GeForce6100SM-M, 25.94% faster than ECS RS485M-M (ATI Radeon Xpress 1100), 27.16% faster than MSI K9AGM2 (AMD 690G), 33.83% faster than ECS AMD690GM-M2 (AMD 690G) and 44.88% faster than Foxconn A690GM2MA (AMD 690G).

The problem is that even the “worst” PCI Express video card is a lot faster than on-board video solutions: GeForce 6200 with 64-bit memory interface and TurboCache technology was 74% faster than Abit AN-M2.

ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe was 9.27% faster than the reviewed motherboard when we installed our overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS.