Small Wonder - Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi

Overclocking & Test Setup

Overclocking

Mini-ITX boards are not exactly the type of boards overclocking enthusiasts will go for and the Zotac 9300-ITX shows this by having extremely limited overclocking options. In fact, the other thing that its BIOS allows you to tweak is its FSB clock. There were no options for changing the CPU ratio. Truth be told, this BIOS offers very little for you to play around with, which is not entirely unexpected.

• FSB Clock: 400 - 2500MHz
• CPU Ratio: Not adjustable
• CPU Voltage: in 0.02V steps up to +0.30V
• Memory Voltage: 1.90 - 2.10V (in 0.1V steps)
• NB Voltage: 1.10 - 1.25V (in 0.05V steps)

Test Setup

To determine the worth of this Zotac 9300-ITX, we'll be comparing it closely with the MSI P7NGM-Digital (hence forth known as MSI Digital), which is also based on the GeForce 9300 mGPU chipset. As such, we'll be using the exact same test setup for the Zotac 9300-ITX as that of the MSI P7NGM-Digital.

However, we encountered some problems while setting up the test system. For one, couldn't install the AHCI drivers for the hard disk. Whenever we tried to do so, for some reason, Windows won't install. Secondly, we noted that the memory could only run when command per clock settings were set to 2T. That is to say the memory controller can only issue instructions every other clock cycle, which in turn could lead to latency issues and less than optimal performance. The test setup used is as follows:-

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-16 (MSI P7NGM-Digital @ 5-5-5-15)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA 80GB HDD
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c

We've also thrown in the Intel DG45ID (Intel G45) and ASUS P5N7A-VM (ASUS P5) into the mix for better comparison. The IGPs were all manually allocated 256MB of frame buffer and were all driven by ForceWare 178.24 drivers, whereas the chipset drivers used were 20.08. As 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.

To find out if increasing the IGP frame buffer does help in performance, we ran the Zotac 9300-ITX with 256MB of frame buffer for one run, and 512MB for another.

Finally, the benchmarks used to test the motherboards are as follows:

• BAPco SYSmark 2007 (ver 1.04)
• Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
• SPECviewperf 9.0
• AquaMark3
• 3DMark06 (ver 110)