The IGP Chronicles Part 2: AMD 780G vs. Intel G45 vs. NVIDIA GeForce 8200
by Gary Key on October 14, 2008 12:40 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
NVIDIA GeForce 8300 by Zotac
Our second board is the Zotac GF8300 and it represents one of their first forays into the motherboard market. This board is a no-frills affair from the BIOS options down to the feature set. However, sometimes this is the best course to take in the low-end market; providing a high quality board that just gets the job done is a plus in our book. That also means that you need to get it right the first time.
Did Zotac get it right the first time? Not exactly, as this board has a couple of layout nuisances in our book. The placement of the 24-pin ATX power connector is in the wrong spot for most case designs and interferes with both airflow and cable management around the CPU area. It is something you can live with but we have seen better on other uATX boards. If you do utilize a dual slot GPU card (a rare event on these boards) then expect to lose the only PCIe x1 slot on the board and two SATA ports. Otherwise, the placement and design of the GF8300 heatsink scores points with us.
The BIOS design and options are minimalistic but do provide base functionality and the ability to overclock slightly. The BIOS is missing Core Voltage settings, something that we expect on all boards in this category - not just for the ability to overclock but also to undervolt the CPU when using the board in an HTPC setup.
The options on the board are decent, ranging from IEEE 1394a support from the VIA VT6307 to HD audio from the Realtek ALC888 (no real-time DTS or DD support) along with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 support. Zotac provides VGA and DVI-D outputs but notably missing is native HDMI. However, we did not have any problems utilizing the included DVI to HDMI adapter when running 7.1 channel HDMI audio out to our receiver. Zotac does offer decent CPU fan controls and monitoring; system fan control is missing but the BIOS does monitor fan speeds.
Zotac utilizes an excellent 3-phase power delivery system along with quality capacitors throughout the board that resulted in very good stability throughout our testing regimen. This board does not support the 140W TDP processors, although Zotac rates it for the 125W TDP processors provided there is good airflow across the PWM area. We have not had any problems with either the 9850BE or 9950BE in several hundred hours of testing, though the MOSFETs like squeal at times when under heavy loads. We recommend sticking to the Tri-Core Phenoms on this board; they also happen to be an excellent value/choice for HTPC or gaming at this time.
Without an overclocking friendly BIOS, we still managed to get our 8750e up to 235HTT and our 4850e to 232HTT before requiring core voltage for stability. We did not overclock our 9950BE in the hopes of saving the board from an early grave. The GF8300 is nothing more than a binned GF8200 and it shows on this board with mGPU shader clocks hitting 1750 MHz and mGPU core clock hitting 710 MHz.
Pros/Cons
We can sum this up quickly. The GF8300 is a good first try for Zotac in the AMD motherboard market. We hope that they will learn from a couple of layout mistakes on the next board. The BIOS needs core voltage settings and we would like to see native HDMI output along with an eSATA option. These boards will likely find their way into HTPC or SOHO setups and these options are important; in fact, a better audio solution would be nice also. Otherwise, the board was extremely stable during testing and we never once had a compatibility problem or a blue screen. Not too many boards can say that and for this reason, we placed the Zotac GF8300 high on our list, as stability is paramount in a system.
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sergev - Monday, January 12, 2009 - link
A fair comparison? Don't think so! A AMD processor with a 140 Watt TDP and a Intel processor with a 95 Watt TDP?? I wonder why the intel chipsets seem more power efficient? If you are testing the performance, ok seems fair, but power efficiency should be measured with two processors with the same TDP. I am convinced that if you did the same test with a AMD 4850E the AMD would beat the crap out the intel versions on power consumption. But yet again, that would not be fair. So keep in mind that this review is not to be taken al to seriously!axiomhk - Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - link
Hi, what amazes me is that it seems no reviewers of the AMD IGP chipsets have caught the serious 2D issues referred to here:http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=2...">http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview....9&th...
However, the only channel that we consumers / mere mortals have to put pressure on AMD is to send feedback to the Catalyst team. Nothing seems to get done and there is not even any acknowledgement that this issue exists across the HD3200/HD3300 IGPs no matter which manufacturer.
The 3D performance is hyped up and that's all very well when the chipset has shown that it can deliver, but in fact many users will spend a lot of time on 2D activities which truly suck. This makes a lot of users regret their purchase.
What the renowned sites such as anandtech and tomshardware can do is try to reproduce the issues, then use their direct contacts to try to see if this issue is being addressed and update the parent article accordingly. Is it possible? Many thanks. GM - Hong Kong.
Zap - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
"The keyboard is not available after drive recognition until the Windows startup routine"Try a different keyboard, or a PS/2 keyboard. I had the same problem with two MSI 750a boards and some Razer USB keyboards. No keyboard until Windows. I had to fix a BIOS problem and had to borrow a keyboard - Logitech G15 USB keyboard worked fine.
arjunp2085 - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Is this not a bit ODD to Compare a $260 to a Lowly Under performing [B}$173 CPU... Geezs This is Grossly inaccurateThink about the BOOST to Post Processing and It differs a Whole Lot to the Post processing capability
Strid - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Yeah, it would have made more sense, IMO, to use lower end processors like AMD 4850E or Intel E5200/7200 which is what most people would use in a HTPC.But if you want to do encoding on your HTPC also, I can see the need for a quad core. But not for your average "movie box".
Staples - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link
Really, this thing came out like 6 months ago it seems and finally we get some video benchmarks on anandtech. I know it has been commented that it did not work right for months because the video drivers were terrible but I can not believe it really took that long. When I had to get a HTPC, I just bought an Athlon BE and a 780G board. Much cheaper and adequate. Which in hindsight the P45 may have performed better, an Intel CPU and a Core 2 CPU would have driven the price up quite a bit.Kreed - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link
Gary, what are you hinting at with the following statement?"That leaves the Intel G45. If you are an Intel fan, this is your only real IGP choice... for the next few days at least."
Are you suggesting that Intel might be releasing a new IGP over the
Kreed - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link
Oops, i didn't get to finish the comment. Here's the comment in full:Gary, what are you hinting at with the following statement?
"That leaves the Intel G45. If you are an Intel fan, this is your only real IGP choice... for the next few days at least."
Are you suggesting that Intel might be releasing a new IGP over the next few days?
Strid - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
The NVIDIA MCP7A (GeForce 9300/9400 IGP) boards supposedly launches today. They're sockey 775 boards. I'm pretty sure AnandTech will have a review up soon.http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...">http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
GPGPUman - Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - link
AMD 780G and 790GX have 8 stream processors (5-way) for a total of 40 possible ops per clock... NOT 10