TWO MOTHERBOARDS, TWO potent chipsets. We received a Biostar's TF8200 A2+ that uses the latest chip¬set from Nvidia, the Geforce 8200; and the A780GM-A from ECS that uses the AMD 780G chipset that has established itself as the best motherboard for onboard graphics performance.

Performance
As usual, we first ran PC World's real world bench¬marking suite, WorldBench 6.0 on the two mother¬boards, the 'Black Series' ECS A780GM-A based on the AMD 780G chip set and the Biostar TF8200 A2+, based on the Nvidia GeForce 8200 chip set. The ECS returned a score of 90, and the Biostar bettered it at 92.
Coming to gaming bench¬marks, with 3D Mark 2006 the ECS A780GM-A obtained 1463 points, which is impressive for an onboard graphics chip. Here, the new Biostar TF8200 A2+ was not able to close in on the ECS in this test, lagging 20 per-

THE BIOSTAR TF8200 A2+ makes for an ideal choice if you are look¬ing for an inexpensive entry level gaming setup. cent behind with a score of 1082 points. It is in real world tests that the Nvidia 8200 gnaws at the AMD 780G's figures.We ran Com¬pany of Heroes at 1024 x 768 resolution and low quality settings with antialiasing enabled - the ECS A780GM-A managed 27 fps on average. The Biostar TF8200 A2+ bettered the ECS by outputting 37 fps. The same test run at a lower 800 x 600 showed the same difference, 52 fps for the

THE ATI RADEON HD 3200 onboard video enables decent gaming and makes Blu-ray movies playable at full resolution ..
It 461 JULY 2008 Geforce 8200 and 42fps for the AMD 780G. We ran DOOM 3 also at 1024 x 768 resolution and medium quality settings and obtained 44 fps with the Biostar and 40fps with the ECS; a smaller differ¬ence. With different games, the difference in perfor¬mance varies but the new Nvidia 8200 chipset comes on top in most cases.

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Features
Both these motherboards allow you to add an addi¬tional graphics card and enable a dual graphics setup. In case of the AMD chip set-based ECS, the sys¬tem is called Hybrid Cross¬fire and the Nvidia-chipset based Biostar is called (no points for guessing) Hybrid SLI. You can use any Geforce 8400 or 8500 series graphics card to make use of hybrid SLI, but for Hybrid CrossFire, you need a Radeon 3400 graphics card and other series are not currently supported.

In terms of expansion slots, both these mother¬boards score at par again ¬three PCI slots, 2 PCIe xl and of course a PCle x16 for adding a video card; six SATA ports and 1 IDE.

Both companies have cho¬sen to go the silent cooling way, making their models more suitable for HTPC use (both motherboards have an HDMI output). A con¬spicuous omission on the ECS is that of a DVI port. The onboard video chips on both motherboards help in decoding full HD movies.

Verdict
Either of these mother¬boards will serve you well if you are looking to start off on gaming without an immediate investment in a discrete graphics card. The ECS motherboard does have an edge with connec¬tivity, but given the more flexible hybrid SLI and bet¬ter overall performance in gaming, out choice is the Biostar TF8200 A2+ which is also cheaper by Rs. 500.