Testbed and Methods

The main goal of this preliminary test session was to determine the level of performance of the integrated GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets. In the theoretical part of the review we have repeatedly stressed the fact that it does not make any sense to compare these chipsets with today’s graphics cards because the chipsets have obviously worse characteristics from the architectural point of view. The new integrated chipsets from NVIDIA are not even supposed to compete with standalone graphics cards. They are targeted at a different sector of the market. So, it is only sensible to compare the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 with products of their own category, i.e. with integrated chipsets with DirectX 9 support.

There is as yet only one more chipset with an integrated graphics core whose capabilities make it suitable for “digital home?computers. We mean ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 and this chipset will be compared with NVIDIA’s new products below.

Besides testing the integrated chipsets using their own graphics core, we also carried out some tests with an external graphics card. So we will give you information on how efficient the graphics cores built into the chipsets are and also how high the “overall?performance of the chipsets is. This overall performance is compared with that of a system with a mainboard on the discrete NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset.

So, here’s a full list of hardware parts employed in the tests:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU (Palermo, 2.0GHz, 2 x 512KB L2)
• Mainboards:
• DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra)
• ECS RS480-M (ATI Radeon Xpress 200)
• Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS (NVIDIA GeForce 6100 + nForce 410)
• Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS (NVIDIA GeForce 6150 + nForce 430)
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10)
• PowerColor RADEON X800 XT graphics card
• Western Digital Raptor WD740GD hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150)

We performed all tests in Windows XP SP2.