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Foxconn A7DA-S & MSI DKA790GX Platinum Review
[Abstract]
Introduction When AMD launched its 780G chipset early this year, it was hailed as one of the best integrated chipsets in the market. Intel was yet to deliver on its newer 4-series chipset then ...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Integrated Graphics Performance
In this section, we took a closer look at the performance numbers of the integrated GPU on the 790GX and pit it against its weaker 780G counterpart. On paper, both the Radeon HD 3300 found on the 790GX and the Radeon HD 3200 (780G) have a similar underlying hardware configuration. What differs mostly is the higher core clock on the Radeon HD 3300 at 700MHz, a 200MHz advantage over the Radeon HD 3200. And of course, the Radeon HD 3300 on the boards we've tested can call on its own dedicated frame buffer (128MB for both 790GX boards here) running at a decent speed (DDR3-1333) to improve its performance.
One thing that we found out is that the Foxconn motherboard could only allocate a maximum of 256MB of system memory to the integrated GPU, while MSI took this further by allowing 512MB. So if you have more RAM than you can use, the MSI is a better choice. For the sake of our benchmarks, we obviously set both boards to 256MB during testing, though we'll only be presenting the MSI DKA790GX Platinum scores as representative of a Radeon HD 3300.
Since we're interested in the performance of the IGP on the 780G and 790GX, we compared the MSI DKA790GX Platinum to Gigabyte's GA-MA78GM-S2H, which sports a Radeon HD 3200. Both platforms were tested using 2GB of DDR2 memory and an Athlon 64 FX-62 processor running at 2.5GHz. The benchmarks used were 3DMark06 (ver 110), Quake 4 (ver 1.3, High Quality) and Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1, with graphics details setting level of 2 instead of our usual 5). The settings were calibrated to the mainstream segment of these IGPs and hence, anti-aliasing was turned off in all cases and modest resolutions like 1280 x 1024 and 1024 x 768 were used as along with average detail quality in games like Unreal Tournament 3.
As you can see, the graphics performance of the 790GX chipset is significantly improved over the 780G's Radeon HD 3200. It's still however not the most capable of GPUs and not at all recommended for any serious gaming enthusiast. You would be better off getting a mainstream discrete graphics card instead. As you can compare with the 3DMark06 results from our 2007 Graphics Performance Charts article, the results obtained by the IGP of today is equivalent to entry-level discrete graphics cards. While this is certainly progress, it's not enough when you consider how much more complex games of today are in contrast, thus the need of an even more power GPU. What these IGP GPUs excel in are HD video decoding needs and you'll see more of this in a related article shortly.
And lest you think of fitting in a Radeon HD 3400 series card for Hybrid Graphics, we have to disagree and say that the marginal benefits of 'CrossFiring' such low-end GPUs are hardly worth the effort, especially with prices of much superior mainstream cards like the new Radeon 4600 series just US$40 - US$50 more than a new Radeon HD 3450.
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