Overclocking Results:

stock max. oc motherboard speed: 200 mhz 306 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

Even though the AMD 690G is intended for the mainstream market, the integrated chipset has turned out to be a pretty good overclocker. With the MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital equipped with an AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ processor and a 2GB set of Corsair DOMINATOR Twin2X2048-8888C4DF memory, PCSTATS is giving this motherboard its best opportunity to reach high speeds.

Before overclocking began, the CPU clock multiplier was set to run at 8x and the memory to operate at DDR2-667 MHz mode. Starting at 200 MHz, the motherboard clock speed was slowly increased in 5 MHz increments.

There weren't many motherboard options so we essentially just increased the motherboard frequency. To our surprise, the MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital reached 306 MHz without any difficulty!

That seemed to be the limit though, any higher and the motherboard would start to flake out while running benchmarks. An overclocked speed of 306 MHz from the entry level MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital motherboard is definitely a very positive result.

BIOS Highlights

The MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital BIOS provides only the most basic of memory timing options, so overclockers shouldn't expect too much. This motherboard is not intended for high performance tweakers.

In the K9AG Neo2 Digital's Cell Menu section, we get the overclocking options. The motherboard frequency can be adjusted between 200-500 MHz in 1 MHz increments and the CPU clock multiplier can be lowered. There are some DDR2 memory speed options and you can increase the CPU voltage to 1.55V and the DDR2 memory voltage to 2.2V.

Prelude to Benchmarks

With the AMD 690G being Microsoft Windows Vista ready, PCSTATS will be testing the MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital motherboard in Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit. Consequently there are slightly less benchmarks than we would normally have for a WindowsXP based test system because benchmark compatibility with Vista is still finding its feet.

The details of how the MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this AMD 690G based motherboard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system #1 reference system #2 reference system #3 processor: amd Athlon64 X2 5000+ (AM2) AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ (AM2) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 AMD Athlon64 FX-60 (Socket 939) Clock Speed: 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz 9 x 266 MHz = 2.4 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz Motherboard: MSI K9AG Neo2 Digital (AMD 690G) Biostar TF7050-M2 (GF 7050PV) ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDready (GF 7050PV) MSI K9AGM2-FIH (AMD 690G) Albatron KM51PV-AM2 (GF6150) ECS AMD690GM-M2 (AMD 690G) Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H (AMD 690G) ECS G33T-M2 (Intel G33 Expresss) Asus A8N-VM (GF 6150) Videocard: MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD-OC Memory: 2x 1024MB Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 2x 1024MB Corsair Twin2X2048-8888C4DF 2x 1024MB Patriot PDC2G4000ELK Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Intel Reference AMD Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Software Setup: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate nVIDIA Forceware 15.00 ATi Catalyst 7.4 nVIDIA Forceware 158.18 Benchmarks: SYSMark 2007 Preview SiSoft Sandra XIb PCMark05 3DMark06 Doom 3 FEAR