Introduction

While there has been criticism about the acquisition of ATI from the jolly green giant AMD, it has indefinitely produced one good thing, a stable platform for AMD to base its CPU's around. No longer will they have to rely on their third-party chipset manufacturers to make good platforms for them, now they can make their own and so far they have released one chipset under the AMD brand, the 690G.

690G is in no way a high performance chip, it's aimed at the integrated graphics market. However, its design is extremely efficient, its onboard graphics core is one of the fastest we have ever seen for an integrated chipset and it was even able to knock NVIDIA off the top of the IGP market.

The 690G was well ahead of the GeForce 6100 and 6150 in terms of its HD ready design, it's able to accommodate a HDMI interface. AMD put its best foot forward and its taken until now for NVIDIA to come up with a counterpart, enter the GeForce 7050.

NVIDIA's latest IGP based chipset is designed to directly compete with the 690G for the AMD Athlon 64 platform. Today we have been given our first 7050 based board from ASRock, we will be comparing this against the 690G chipset to see which ends up being the better option.

Let's hop to it.