Feature Articles

A Quick Look at NVIDIA's MCP73 Motherboard GPU

By Timothy Fernandez - 12 Oct 2007

Quick Benchmarks

Quick Benchmarks

We ran some initial benchmarks on a few modern games just to see how the GeForce 7150 compares against the Intel GMA X3000 in a similar configuration. Considering that NVIDIA is hyping up their single-channel memory controller, we configured our G965 board to run in single-channel mode as well. Note that these are very quick benchmarks we threw in to give an overall view of the chipsets' GPU performance and is not exhaustive enough for a proper overall conclusion. For that, you'll have to refer to a full review of an MCP73 based motherboard such as the MSI P6NGM we reviewed soon after this article.

We've also connected a power meter to the main power plug for our test bed to measure power usage of the system (in Watts) while it was idle and during loaded environments. Idle measurements were taken at the desktop, while the load measurements were taken running the SM 3.0 Canyon Flight workload on 3DMark06.

Test setup used for these benchmarking runs are based on the configuration below:-

NVIDIA GeForce 7150/nForce 630i Reference Board

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0 (Single-Channel only)
  • GeForce 7150 (configured with 256MB UMA framebuffer) with ForceWare 163.71 drivers
  • 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)

Intel G965 Express Reference Board

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-15 CAS 5.0 (Single-Channel)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Intel GMA X3000 DVMT 256MB - with beta drivers 6.14.10.4864
  • Intel INF 8.1.1.1001 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

F.E.A.R. turned out to be a pretty well matched benchmark for both GPUs as the Intel GMA X3000 actually managed to keep up with the GeForce 7150. In F.E.A.R., we ran the benchmarks at 'Low' graphics setting at 800x600. Both boards generated playable frame rates with half decent image quality. The GeForce 7150 won comfortably for the other two games. Most notably was the difference in rendering quality (not speed) in Quake 4. Being an OpenGL game, the Intel GMA X3000 was unable to render scenes properly and even colors were off. This is perhaps one of the strongest arguments for NVIDIA. Taking away the performance aspect, the GeForce 7-series mGPU share the same capabilities, features and driver support as its discreet counterparts, which means consistent image quality and application compatibility.

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