IGP Power Consumption - 780G, GF8200, and G35

Test Setup

Our tests today will concentrate on platform power requirements when playing back High Definition content and taking a leisurely flight around the Honolulu harbor with Flight Simulator X. We utilized PCMark Vantage to track power requirements for general office/home applications. The results were very similar to our HD playback scores so we omitted them for this particular article. We are not providing overclocking or discrete GPU numbers in today's article; this is all about the base setups we utilized for testing these chipsets.

Based on the 780G's penchant for HD playback and casual gaming, we figured the natural competitors in this particular segment would be the Intel G35 and NVIDIA GeForce 8200. Fortunately, we had several GeForce 8200 retail boards arrive this week. NVIDIA provided WHQL platform (18.11) and GPU (174.74) drivers on their website last week. However, these drivers still do not provide Hybrid SLI or HybridPower capabilities. We have already noticed several problems ranging from HDMI synchronizing to the inability of PowerDVD 8.0 or WinDVD 9.0 to recognize the driver set for playback capabilities in certain situations.

We selected identical components for our three testbeds, with the obvious exception of the motherboard and CPU. Our choice of processors represents three different levels. Our minimum spec processors consist of the AMD Athlon LE1600 and Intel Core 2 Duo E2200. Both of these processors are the recommend minimum we would use on these platforms in order to provide acceptable results with HD playback, general applications, and casual gaming. Our 2.5GHz capable AMD 4850e X2 and upcoming Intel E7200 represent a middle ground in performance. These two processors are the ones we would most likely purchase for our platforms. Our final selection consists of the latest entry-level quad-core processors from AMD and Intel, the Phenom 9550 and Core 2 Quad Q9300.