Foxconn A690GM2MA Motherboard Review

Conclusions

It is always important to have in mind the audience a given product is targeted to. Foxconn A690GM2MA and AMD 690G are clearly targeted to digital home PCs, where gaming isn’t the most important factor. For this PC class, video quality, connectivity options and size are more relevant.
This motherboard has on its side the support for two video monitors, which is great. On motherboards with on-board video based on other chipsets you need to buy an add-on video card if you’d like to have more than one video display.

This motherboard has two advantages over competition, first full support to 7.1 analog speakers, providing six independent audio jacks on its rear panel. Some motherboards around (like ASUS M2A-VM) have only three jacks, making it impossible for you to hook up a 7.1 analog speaker system and also killing your mic in and line in inputs when using a 5.1 analog system. The second advantage is that it has four memory sockets, allowing you to add more memory to your PC in the future. Some motherboards based on AMD 690G like ECS AMD690GM-M2 and MSI K9AGM2 (AMD 690G) have only two memory sockets, so with these boards if you want to upgrade your memory in the future you need to remove your old modules and install new ones, not allowing you to keep your old memories.

On the other hand, we expected a lot more from this motherboard. This motherboard has some serious flaws for a motherboard targeted to be a digital audio and video editing workstation.

First, the audio input quality isn’t good enough for today’s standards. This board provides only 85 dB on its audio input and you need at least 95 dB there. For this reason, avoid this motherboard if you want to build a system to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting VHS tapes, cassette tapes, LPs, etc to digital format).

Secondly, this motherboard does not have on-board SPDIF connectors and even though the board provides a header for SPDIF, it doesn’t come with an SPDIF bracket, making it hard for users willing to connect their PCs to their home theater receivers. It should either have SPDIF connectors soldered on the motherboard or come with this bracket.

In third place, this motherboard provides a S-Video output, however you will need a bracket that does not come with the board to use it.

And finally, performance. Even though it achieved a good overall performance for regular programs – i.e., good performance for running daily office applications like Word and Excel – it achieved a gaming performance lower than other AMD 690G motherboards we included in our comparison.
In our methodology we always leave the amount of video memory that is “stolen” from the RAM memory on its default value, by clearing the CMOS memory. On this motherboard this value was 128 MB, while on the other AMD 690G motherboards this option was set to “auto”, option not available on the reviewed board.

The good news is that this motherboard will perform almost like a high-end motherboard if you disable its on-board video and install a “real” video card on it, making a good product for users thinking of installing an add-on video card later. Since this motherboard has two video outputs, you can even let its on-board video enabled in order to connect your PC to four independent displays, two connected on the motherboard and two on the add-on video card.

However, don’t expect a good 3D performance from any motherboard with on-board video: even the most low-end video card available on the market, like GeForce 6200 TurboCache with 64-bit memory interface, is a lot faster.