Thread: Performance Motherboard

Performance is always an important factor no matter how many features a motherboard comes with. Going by overall performance, the Intel chipset motherboards were lagging behind the all new NVlDIA GeForce 9300 chipsets. Gaming performance is important in a test for mother¬board with onboard graphics which is where the 9300s excelled. We also have to be clear that the Intel G43 and G45 chipsets have the better SATA controller than the NVlDIA ones. In all the data transfer tests where 4 GB files were copied to the drive, we noticed that the G43 and the G45 motherboards were three to four seconds faster. The MSI P7NGM board especially recorded rather poor scores in this test.



It was the same in the PC Mark tests. Although the 9300 boards performed a lot better in comparison to the Intel chipsets in the graphics tests of the benchmark suite, the real-world desktop application tests showed Intel chipsets doing better.Of all the motherboards, the ZOTAC GeForce 9300 is a good performer, only slightly ahead of the ECS GF9300T-A motherboard. The only place where the ZOTAC GeForce 9300 lost out to the rest of the moth¬erboards was in the file transfer tests. The 4 GB file transfer test took considerably longer than the other motherboards. Even the MSI P7NGM was lagging far behind the rest. There was little or no difference in the CPU inten¬sive video encoding tests. All of the boards scored between 67 and 70 seconds.

In the games Doom 3 and Company of Heroes all the GeForce 9300 boards from ECS, MSI and ZOTAC scored similarly.
Company Heroes is an RTS and 20 fps in a game like that can't be called great, but it's still close to twice as much as the Intel
G45 and G43 boards from MSI and ASUS could achieve. Doom 3 painted a different picture. At 640 x 480 with ultra quality but
no anti-aliasing, the game runs pretty comfortably at about 50 fps. With the resolution set to 1024 x 768, frame rates dropped
to around 30 fps. When Doom 3 was first released, the best of cards were only able to run the game at around 40 to 50 fps at 1024 x 768. In that aspect, motherboard chipsets have come a long way since then. The MSI G43M2 andthe G45 powered
ASUS P5QEM could run Doom 3 but scored close to half of what the 9300s were capable of. 3D Mark 2005, another
benchmark that stresses a lot on the on the graphics subsystem, ran very well on the ECS GF9300T-A and the Zotac
GeForce 9300. They scored 2810 and 2824 respectively. What was interesting to see in 3D Mark tests
was that the NVIDIA boards helped get the CPU score up a lot as compared to the Intel based ones. Intel's onboard graphics solutions seem to depend a lot on the CPU.