Biostar TA690G AM2 AMD 690G Motherboard

For most of its existence, the AMD processor
platform has heavily depended on third party chipsets made by VIA, nVIDIA, ATI, ALI, or SIS. It's fortunes were tied to the performance and capabilities of 3rd party core logic. In 2006 AMD gobbled up the Canadian videocard company ATi. ATI had been making headway with its own line of motherboard chipsets, and for the first time since this merger AMD has had its own in-house motherboard chipset to pair with an Athlon64 processor. The last time the planets aligned like this was with the AMD750 Irongate (Slot A) and the AMD760 (Socket A, SMP platform), but in each of those situations that was core logic born out of utter necessity.

ATi's experience in building chipsets is not a long tale, but its pre-AMD merger platforms seriously challenged stock from Intel and nVIDIA's stables. The ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset is still considered faster than Intel's 975X, and that was certainly quite a feat at the time. However, the real winner in ATI's line up was a little known chipset slated for release at the time of the merger, the 'RS690.' Intended to be married with an AMD Athlon64 processor, the 'RS690' was said to beat the pants off nVIDIA's extremely popular GeForce 6100 & 6150 series...