A Quick Look at NVIDIA's MCP73 Motherboard GPU

Introduction

It has been exactly two years since NVIDIA focused their energies into the integrated graphics processor (IGP) or what they would like to call the motherboard GPU (mGPU) market with the launch of the GeForce 6150 chipset back in September 2005. And now, finally, we get to meet its successor, the GeForce 7-series mGPU chipsets and the first attempt by NVIDIA to penetrate the Intel IGP market.

With high definition being a must have feature today, both AMD and Intel have stepped up to the plate for their respective platforms earlier this year with updated IGPs supporting HDMI output capabilities. NVIDIA however, remained strangely silent. Their late entry could be due to the fact that they are a player in both the AMD and Intel market, choosing instead to show their hand after all the cards have been dealt.

In this article, we will be looking at the Intel supporting versions of the new GeForce 7-series mGPU chipsets. The main players for the entry-level and mainstream segments are SiS and Intel themselves, and as expected, NVIDIA has a solution to cover everyone. At the mainstream level, the GeForce 7150/nForce 630i and GeForce 7100/nForce 630i chipsets will compete with Intel's G965 family in the IGP performance category while the 7050/nForce 630i and 7050/nForce 610i are more within the ultra-budget range of the SiS672FX. Intel's G31 and G33 chipsets stand somewhere in the middle for the budget entertainment and HTPC market.

NVIDIA was actually supposed to have launched the GeForce 7-series mGPU (MCP73) in the second quarter of 2007, with a DirectX 10 part codenamed MCP79 in the fourth quarter. This follows Intel's timeline for the G35, which includes the new GMA X3500, also a DirectX 10 part. Considering that the MCP73 chipsets only made it out to market now, it might be a logical surmise that we won't see the MCP79 till early 2008. However, if NVIDIA is on track to compete with Intel's G35, they might push out a surprise launch of the MCP79 in the coming two months. If that happens, the MCP73 chipsets will be pushed down to an even lower price bracket of entry level boards as MCP79 and other equivalent competing chips take on the mainstream segment. It's really an exciting period of time for the hardware market as there are several new products of all segments heading our way. For now, let's move on as we let you in on more details of the MCP73 family.

NVIDIA MCP73 - One Chip to Control It All

The NVIDIA GeForce 7-series mGPU for the Intel platform is a single chip core logic controller manufactured under TSMC's 80nm process. This means the chip will take over all the logic processing for IGP and traditional Northbridge and Southbridge functions as well, combining the GeForce 7 mGPU with the nForce 630/610i MCP into one chip. Regardless, NVIDIA has made sure that the MCP73 will not be feature-deprived (at least not the high-end models).

As a 'Northbridge', the MCP73 will fully support all Intel LGA775 processors, including the upcoming 45nm Penryn. This means full 1333MHz FSB support as well. However, the MCP73 will only feature a single-channel DDR2-800 memory controller. There will be 18 PCI Express lanes in total with a configuration of 16/1/1. The 'Southbridge' features include a MediaShield storage controller supporting four SATA 3.0Gbps ports, dual channel IDE and up to RAID 5. The chipset will also feature HD Audio, Gigabit LAN and ten USB 2.0 ports.

GeForce 7 in the House

The GPU component will be sporting a GeForce 7-class architecture, supporting all the features of its discreet counterparts such as full DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 with a core clock from 500MHz to 630MHz (depending o the mGPU model). The display controller features two digital outputs, one DVI and one HDMI, but most importantly, they are both fully HDCP compliant for HD protected content (HD DVD/Blu-ray) output. However, like all low end GeForce 7 GPUs, the MCP73 display controller will only support a single-link DVI output. Luckily, this is more than sufficient for a full 1080p display.

Graphics performance of the MCP73 is expected to be within the range of the GeForce 7100 and 7200 discreet GPUs, which means that while you can expect to play games, you can also expect only marginally passable frame rates at low resolutions. NVIDIA obviously knows the limitations of the mGPU all too well in terms of gaming. So, while they have focused a little on the gaming aspect, the real direction that the MCP73 is taking is modern day productivity and compatibility instead. And this time, someone has finally managed to hit the spot. NVIDIA has focused on the rise in everyday 3D capable applications from Adobe Acrobat to Google Earth as the main target of the MCP73, promising better applications compatibility (Hey, it's a GeForce!) and rendering performance. For additional information, we've briefly covered these aspects from our hands-on trial on GPU assisted applications.

This is where the discussion regarding NVIDIA's choice for a single channel controller comes in. During our , we made it known that we didn't think much of a single channel controller in today's home computing market, especially on an IGP chipset which relies on the memory subsystem bandwidth to feed the GPU. With the MCP73, NVIDIA supposedly has a highly optimized and efficient internal GPU to memory pipeline to compensate, which they're claiming trumps all of its competition. The MCP73 is the only IGP capable of achieving Vista Premium certification through a single 1GB DIMM. Of course, the higher GPU clocks on the Intel versions of the NVIDIA mGPU help as well. If you look at NVIDIA's chipset comparison chart (downloadable here ), you'll notice that the line of AMD GeForce 7-series mGPUs (which are inherently dual-channel) are all clocked at 425MHz only, while the GeForce 7150 for Intel is clocked a whole 200MHz more at 630MHz. In any case, we'll see just how strong the MCP73's single-channel controller is in our benchmark section of the MSI P6NGM review.

Chipset Block Diagrams and Differences

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.

Video Decoding Performance

Strangely enough, and perhaps most disappointing to note however is that the Intel versions of the GeForce 7-series mGPU doesn't seem to support PureVideo acceleration at all, not even in the flagship GeForce 7150. The only model in the entire line up to support PureVideo decoding is the GeForce 7050 PV for the AMD platform. While this does not necessarily mean no acceleration at all - we're sure older MPEG-2 decoding is available - the GPU may not be up to task to handle HD video streams. We think the reason for this limitation is due to the external single-channel memory controller that may not provide sufficient bandwidth and the needed latency to sustain such a feature support as we've learnt in the past that a graphics card's memory subsystem plays a big part in its ability to handle HD video acceleration.

We tested out our theory using a standard 1080p H.264 Quicktime trailer of the movie Click, which is readily available for download off the Quicktime website. We gauged the performance of the GeForce 7150 against a discreet GeForce 8600 GTS card as well as the Intel GMA X3000. The system configuration is the same as the previous page with the GeForce 8600 GTS installed on the GeForce 7150/nForce 630i board. From our results, it seems pretty clear that the GeForce 7150 is unable to handle HD decoding well enough. Note that Quicktime trailers are a lot less demanding than an actual HD DVD or Blu-ray disc movie that have far higher bitrates. Even with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, it could not sustain playback without dropping frames. The clip was still watchable, but there was visible slowdowns and jerkiness. It also had the highest CPU usage of the tested systems in the high 60-70% range. Based on the performance here, the GPU will probably be sufficient for 720p playback and/or regular MPEG-2 and WMV decoding if you have a powerful enough processor.

It may also be interesting to note that the GMA X3000 actually used less overall CPU power throughout the video playback, but the IGP was severely underpowered for HD decoding, capable of maintaining an average frame rate of only 12fps that was severely choppy.

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