Gigabyte & Zotac Socket AM2+ Mobo Roundup --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Zotac GeForce 8300

Moving onto the NVIDIA GeForce 8 series of mGPU, we first look at the more powerful GeForce 8300 variant from Zotac. If you have read our previous coverage of the GeForce 8 mGPU series, you would know that the GeForce 8300 is just a slightly faster (in terms of onboard graphics) version of the GeForce 8200 we previewed. The core clock is the same at 500MHz but the 16 stream processors are running at 1.5GHz on the 8300 instead of 1.2GHz on the 8200. The feature list is competitive with what AMD offers, with HyperTransport 3.0, PCI Express 2.0, 12 USB 2.0 ports, six SATA 3.0Gbps, 2 IDE devices and of course having a DirectX 10 capable integrated GPU with an unified shader architecture being a key feature.

Like the AMD 780G, the main draw here is the integrated GPU, which appears to be the equivalent of the 780G's Radeon HD 2400 in GPU terms as it uses a GeForce 8400 GS. That gives it the PureVideo HD package that should allow for full hardware accelerated HD decoding and is also compliant with HDMI 1.3a output. GeForce technologies like Hybrid SLI is included and there are two aspects to that. With a suitable discrete GPU installed on its PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, the GeForce 8300 chipset can boost performance through SLI and at the same time, alternate between the onboard and discrete graphics depending on usage, leading to some power savings.

Other NVIDIA technologies include its MediaShield technology, its umbrella term for its storage options, which for the Zotac GeForce 8300 means six SATA 3.0Gbps ports and two IDE devices. It even has RAID 5, unlike the AMD 780G. HD Audio (Intel Azalia standard) is also found while Gigabit LAN is built-in with NVIDIA's FirstPacket technology. Also, this chipset allows for native 8-channel LPCM audio bitstream output via HDMI, something that AMD's 780G is not capable of doing. You can also check out our GeForce 8200 mGPU preview (which is essentially the same technology) if you need more details.

A single heatsink is required for this GeForce 8300 mGPU board, because it's a single chip solution. Like the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H, there's space for only four expansion slots.

No HDMI is on this GeForce 8300 board though there's at least DVI, which takes in a DVI-to-HDMI adaptor for HDMI needs. There's also a digital coaxial output in addition to the 6 analog audio jacks.

6 SATA ports and the IDE connector shown here provide sufficient storage.

Four DDR2 DIMM slots supporting up to DDR2-1066 are on this board. The first DIMM looks to be much too close to the CPU socket.

Compared to the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H, the layout of the expansion slots seem slightly better.

Not surprisingly, given its single chip nature, the Zotac GeForce 8300 comes with only one large, low profile heatsink. Zotac did surprise us by having the ATX power connector situated besides the PCIe x16 slot. This is definitely not an ideal place to position the connector, with the CPU heatsink potentially getting in the way of the cables while the power cables themselves could choke the area of airflow. The other connectors are however more or less where one expects them to be, though the SATA ports are also oriented upwards and a longer dual-slot graphics card may interfere with a pair of them.

The rear I/O panel also had most of the connectors and ports that we expected, with the lack of HDMI a slight inconvenience for HTPC setups, though Zotac has a DVI-to-HDMI adapter just for this purpose. With the amount of space however, we wondered why Zotac did not add more ports here. Do note that the onboard GPU only supports one display output at any time, so dual displays are out despite the D-Sub and DVI options here.



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