ASUS M2A-VM Motherboard Review

3D Performance: 3DMark05

We again followed the same methodology described previously, but now running 3DMark05. This program measures 3D performance by simulating DirectX 9.0c games, i.e., using Shader 3.0. This programming model is used by the latest games and supported by GeForce 6100-405, but it isn’t supported by Radeon Xpress 1100 nor by AMD 690G.
It isn’t fair to use this program to evaluate 3D performance of motherboards with on-board video, as they achieve a very low score on this program. We ran it anyway, basically to see the performance achieved by ASUS M2A-VM using a real video card installed and also to compare it to ECS RS485M-M and ECS GeForce6100SM-M.
You can check the results of our benchmarking below. All the listed video cards were installed on ASUS M2A-VM.

This time the results were very favorable to AMD690G, as its on-board video was 43.70% faster than the one provided by GeForce 6100-405 and 55.95% faster than the one provided by Radeon Xpress 1100.
But it was still beaten by the two most low-end PCI Express video cards available on the market: GeForce 6200 TC (64 MB, 64-bit) was 29.90% faster and GeForce 6200 (128 MB, 128-bit) was 57.42% faster than the on-board video of the reviewed motherboard.
When we installed a GeForce 7800 GTX on the reviewed card, it achieved the same performance level of an ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe with the same video card installed.