Shootouts

Intel IGP Chipset Showdown - GeForce 9300 mGPU vs. Intel G45

By Vincent Chang - 2 Nov 2008

Overclocking & Test Setup

Overclocking

When it comes to mainstream chipsets, especially when they are in a microATX form factor like the ASUS P5N7A-VM, we usually don't think of overclocking it. However, we did find some overclocking options in the BIOS of the ASUS and there were even overclocking profiles for users. Clearly, the more daring user can get some performance boost out of this board with the appropriate processor and memory. The integrated GPU can also be ramped up, though we didn't try that. Just solely on increasing the FSB, we managed a rather decent 420MHz (up from the initial 333MHz) before the board hung on us.

Some of the overclocking options that we found in the BIOS:-

  • FSB Clock: 333 - 2400MHz
  • CPU Ratio: 6.0 - 9.5
  • CPU Voltage: 0.85 - 1.55V (in 0.00625V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: 1.85 - 2.24375V (in 0.00625V steps)
  • Chipset Voltage: Auto, +50mV, +100mV, +150mV
  • iGPU Overclock: 450 - 999MHz
  • Shader Overclock: 1000 - 2000MHz

The same could not be said for Intel's reference G45 board, where there were no options at all to adjust any settings relevant to overclocking. It was hardly a surprise, since that's not usually something that consumers intend to do for such motherboards.


Test Setup

We'll be comparing the two IGP chipsets directly in a variety of benchmarks, from the usual general system benchmarks to 3D gaming, while not forgetting HD video playback and the equally important temperature and power consumption numbers. For comparison, we also threw in an older generation NVIDIA IGP, the GeForce 7150/nForce 630i so as to find out the gains (if any) that the GeForce 9300 mGPU had made over its predecessor. This was in the form of a Gigabyte GA-73UM-S2H motherboard. All the motherboards were updated to the latest available BIOS from their websites before testing.

Test Configuration

  • Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-16 (for Intel DG45ID and ASUS P5N7A-VM)
  • 2 x 1GB Aeneon DDR2-1066 @ DDR2-800 and 4-4-4-12 (for Gigabyte GA-73UM-S2H)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA HDD 80GB
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c

The frame buffer for the IGP chipsets were set to 256MB for all three motherboards tested. The GeForce 9300 was installed with NVIDIA chipset driver version 20.08 while the graphics driver was ForceWare 178.24. For the Intel G45 board, the drivers used were 14.36.3.4990 for the graphics and INF 9.1.0.1007 for the chipset. The Gigabyte GA-73UM-S2H meanwhile was using nForce driver 16.08 for Windows XP and ForceWare 178.24 for the graphics.

During our testing, we noticed that the ASUS P5N7A-VM could not run DDR2-800 at CAS 4.0. After testing with a number of memory modules, we gave up on that and ran it at the default 5-5-5-16. This seems to be an issue that's affecting GeForce 9300 mGPU boards at the moment, as we have read about similar instances in other reviews. If that's the case, we expect a BIOS update to solve it in the near future. If you're wondering why we continued with 4-4-4-12 for the Gigabyte, it was because those were the default timings and there weren't options to change it in the BIOS unfortunately.


Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used to evaluate the performance of the motherboards highlighted here:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 Preview
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • AquaMark3

For 3D gaming performance, we used the following:-

  • Quake 4 (ver 1.3)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)
  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
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