Feature Articles

NVIDIA GeForce 8200 mGPU Preview

By Zachary Chan - 20 Feb 2008

GeForce 8200 Performance Testing

GeForce 8200 Performance Testing

Since we have a motherboard on hand, we decided to give it a spin and see how the GeForce 8200 fares with previous generation Socket AM2 IGP chipsets. As AMD's own 780G is not out yet, we will take our sample comparison scores from the AMD 690G and NVIDIA's older GeForce 6100. The test bed configurations used for the various boards are listed below.

There are a few points to take note of however. The Palit N78S motherboard we have is a very early sample with a beta BIOS and beta drivers. At the time of testing, we did not have an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ on hand as well that was used in our previous articles, so we tried our best to compensate with an Athlon 64 FX-62 underclocked to 2.5GHz. Following AMD's performance rating system, the 2MB L2 of the FX-62 would counter the 100MHz loss in clock speeds of a true 2.6GHz Athlon X2 5000+ processor. Lastly, the Palit N78S does not feature any memory timing options, forcing us to run at SPD.

We usually enforce strict benchmarking rules for our review process, but since this is just an early preview of the GeForce 8200, we went ahead with our testing despite the abovementioned differences. As such, performance numbers in the next few pages should give you a highlight of the current status of the GeForce 8200 chipset/Palit N78S motherboard, but not a conclusive one.

  • Palit N78S (GeForce 8200)
  • AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 @ 2.5GHz, 2x1MB L2
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-16 CAS 5.0*
  • NVIDIA GeForce 8200 256MB UMA frame Buffer
  • NVIDIA nForce 18.07 and ForceWare 171.17
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

 

  • Sapphire Pure Innovation HDMI (AMD 690G)
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz, 2x512KB L2)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0
  • ATI Radeon X1250 IGP 256MB UMA frame butter with HyperMemory
  • ATI Catalyst 7.3 IGP driver package
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

 

  • ASRock AM2NF6G-VSTA (GeForce 6100-405)
  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz, 2x512KB L2)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0
  • NVIDIA GeForce 6100-405 IGP 256MB UMA frame buffer with TurboCache
  • NVIDIA ForceWare 93.71 driver package
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be used in the review to gauge the performance of the Palit N78S:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • AquaMark3
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