Our first thought was to test Hybrid CrossFire for our discrete card option. However, the 785G only supports the HD3450/HD3470 video cards and we would not waste our money on either solution for this platform. The good news is that certain models in the upcoming Evergreen DX11 GPU series from AMD will work in Hybrid CrossFire mode on this chipset.

In the meantime, we installed our HD 4770 video card to see what spending an additional $100 would net for the budget gamer. We set our resolution to 1680x1050, enabled High Quality settings, and 2xAA where applicable. Our results surprised us, as either platform would make for an ideal budget gaming system. The Intel G41 system consistently lead the 785G platform, but the actual gaming experience was identical between the two systems.

Left 4 Dead

Gaming Performance - Left 4 Dead

 

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor

Gaming Performance - Company of Heroes

 

Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II

Gaming Performance - Dawn of War II

 

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Gaming Performance - H.A.W.X.

 

The Sims3

Gaming Performance - Sims3

 

IG Gaming Performance Storage Performance (HDD and USB)
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  • HelToupee - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    How's Linux driver support for video decoding coming along for AMD? Last I checked, it was supported in the closed drivers, but none of the players support it yet.

    Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) )
  • Finally - Wednesday, August 5, 2009 - link

    [quote]Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) [/quote]

    If I was Google, I would ask you:

    Did you mean "10 other people"?
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Same here. Buying a Zotac 9300 ITX board with an Intel chip. VDPAU ftw.
  • mczak - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    IMHO, the biggest drawback with G41 (and G43) isn't even mentioned - you lose two ram slots (some boards still have 4 but then you can equip all 4 only with single-sided ram, so useless). Hence this limits you for all practical purposes to 4GB (2x2GB) of ram. (The chipset could take 2 4GB modules but for that price you could probably buy 2 G45 boards with 8 2 GB modules...)
  • Spivonious - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Some other items...

    The G45 has the X4500HD, the G41 has the X4500. The G41 does not have hardware decoding for blu-ray movies.
  • flipmode - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Is that some kind of double negative? Maybe "fewer and fewer" or something? No biggie, it just caught my eye immediately :smile:
  • Sharles - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    The ICH7 chipset on my motherboard does have 1 PATA channel.
  • Viditor - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Agreed...Gary, you need to correct your table at the index. ICH7 has 1 PATA (2 device) connetion.
  • iamezza - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    There are no graphs showing up on page 5
  • R3MF - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    AMD are making a lot of fuss about 785G/Tigris supporting their next generation Stream computing initiative (read: OpenCL), would you be able to ask them if they intend to provide this support to the 780G chipset too?

    This is important because the 780G will form the core of 2nd gen ultra-mobile platform previously known as Congo.

    I would be very grateful if you would ask this question.

    Thanks

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