Few things are more infamous in the computer industry than the dreadful integrated graphics. At best something fine for 2D and office use and perhaps able to play a game two or three years old and at worst it won't allow you to play a game whatsoever. Many headaches have come from integrated graphics and yet due to how cheap it is it is easily the most widespread among consumers. AMD and Nvidia's integrated graphics chipsets of last year were decent though still unable to play an older, mainstream title such as World of Warcraft at a fairly decent speed. All of that is about to change though on ATI/AMD's side with their brand new chipset launching today in addition to a new low-wattage processor, the AMD 780G and the Athlon X2 4850e. There are a number of new and interesting features of the 780G chipset so let's get started on them.

While Nvidia was the first company with a discrete DirectX 10 graphics ATI is now the first company with DX10 integrated graphics chipset for the mainstream. This integrated graphics is based off of the Radeon HD 3200 series of ATI's graphics cards and an additional coup as with ATI's other 3xxx series of cards it includes their UVD (Unified Video Decoder) to offload decoding of HD video to free up CPU resources in addition to the benefit of their Avivo technology. This should allow for 1080p performance which would be ideal for HTPCs and the like.

A DX10 card alone will definitely go a long way towards increasing the bottom line for integrated graphics which has been detrimental to PC gaming due to poor integrated graphics performance, especially in regards to Intel's integrated graphics which unfortunately is the most popular and commonly used. You'll see later on in the benchmarks the 780G integrated graphics performance is currently unmatched in performance and will be hard for Nvidia or Intel to beat.

The number of display ports is also higher than any other integrated graphics chipset in addition to featuring all new technologies including DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, and VGA output all on the motherboard. In addition if you pair this with another Radeon HD 3450 card you can run what ATI is calling SurroundView with four video outputs and monitors. With just the integrated graphics you can output to two monitors at the same time although HDMI/DVI can't both be used at the same time. For the record the DisplayPort output was not on our Gigabyte motherboard.

The 780G is Socket AM2+ and as such uses the Hypertransport 3.0 interface running at 2GHz speeds with bandwidth of 41.6GB/s. This is the second Socket AM2+ chipset from AMD with the 790FX being the first. As with that chipset PCI-Express 2.0 support is available with one 16x slot available. In addition there is a 1x PCI-E slot, and two additional PCI slots. There are four USB 2.0 ports on the front panel, one Firewire, an e-SATA port, PS2 mouse and keyboard ports, and Gigabit Ethernet. ALC889A provides support for 7.1 sound playback, plus 2 channels of independent stereo output (multiple streaming) through the front panel stereo outputs. All of those panels opens up the accessibility amazingly and is quite awesome for an integrated graphics chipset.

One of the major new features of the 780G Northbridge is what ATI are calling Hybrid Graphics. Basically this is Crossfire enabled combining the integrated graphics and a discrete card in the PCI-E 16x slot which currently only works with the Radeon 3450 and 2400 video cards. In some situations this allows for much higher level of performance, although we wouldn't recommend specifically buying an integrated motherboard to run Hybrid Graphics, if at first you only have 780G integrated graphics or that is all one can afford it does allow for an interesting upgrade option down the line for those users. We're more interested in a situation where discrete cards can be turned off when not needed and integrated 2D video takes over to lower power usage but Hybrid Crossfire is definitely an innovative implementation of integrated graphics working with discrete.

The 780G chipset is built off a 55nm manufacturing process and uses 205 million transistors and thanks to this 55nm process allows for very low power requirements of a little over 1.5W idle for the Northbridge alone.

The Southbridge chipset is based off their SB700 featuring support for 12 USB 2.0 connections with two more USB 1.0, 6 SATA connectors, RAID stripping, RAID mirroring, RAID 10, RAID 0, HD Audio Controller, a single PATA channel and Windows Vista ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost.

AMD expects 780G motherboards to list at $80-$120 with some manufacturers boards available this week and others later in the month.  ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, ECS, Sapphire, Foxconn, Biostar, DFI, ASRock, PCPartner, J&W and Jetway are all releasing motherboards using the AMD 780G/SB700 chipsets in their designs. As always we'll keep you up to date as to when these motherboards become available at e-tailers. Currently the Gigabyte 780G motherboard we reviewed this chipset with is already at ComputerHQ for $101.

Here are the technical specs on the AMD Athlon X2 4850e. This is a new low-wattage processor running at 2.5GHz that AMD is also launching today at price around $89. We overclocked this to around 3.1GHz by increasing the stock voltage on the 780G chipset, so this chipset is also an excellent overclocker! Also we were able to overclock the 780G video card alone to 825MHz from 500MHz which we also benchmarked on.

Processor: energy efficient AMD Athlonâ„¢ X2 4850e dual-core processor

OPN: ADH4850IAA5DO

CPU Core Count: 2
Operating Frequency: 2.5GHz

L1 Cache Size: 64K - L1 instruction + 64K - L1 data cache per-core (256KB total L1)

L2 Cache Size: 512KB L2 data cache per-core (1MB total dedicated L2 cache)

Manufactured: Fab 36 / Dresden, Germany
Process Technology: 65-nanometer DSL SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
Packaging: Socket AM2 (940-pin organic micro PGA)
HyperTransport Spec: One 16-bit/16-bit link @ 2.0GHz (1GHz DDR) full duplex (up to 8.0 GB/sec bandwidth)

Memory Controller: One integrated 128-bit dual-channel memory controller (up to 12.8GB/sec bandwidth)

Supported Memory Speeds: DDR 2 memory up to and including PC2 6400 (DDR2-800) unbuffered

Total Processor bandwidth: Up to 20.8 GB/sec

Approximate Transistor count: 221 million
Approximate Die Size: 118 mm2
Nominal Voltage: 1.15/1.20/1.25 V
Max Thermal Power: 45W
Max Ambient Case Temp: 78o Celsius
Max Processor Current: 36.5 A
Min P-State (power management): 1.0 GHz

o Nominal Voltage @ min P-state: 1.0 V
o Max Thermal Power @ min P-state: 18.1 W
o Max Current @ min P-state: 15.1A
 

Let's move onto our test system specs.

Here are the specs of our test systems.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium with the 8.47RC2 ATI Catalyst Drivers and Nvidia's 169.28 Forceware drivers. V-sync was disabled with all tests.

Let's start things off with Crysis, the most advanced game engine on the market currently.

Our setups are more complex than usual so we'll explain the exact settings. The 7050 is Nvidia's nForce 630a/7050 integrated video on a Biostar motherboard with the Athlon X2 4850e. The 690G is an Asus M2A-VM 690G integrated graphics chipset on the X2 4850e. The 780G 9600 is the plain 780G chipset with a Phenom 9600 Black Edition at stock clock. The 780G X2 OC is the 780G with the video overclocked to 825MHz (325MHz above the standard clock) with the Athlon X2 4850e. The 780G X2 3450 is the 780G chipset with a Radeon HD 3450 discrete graphics card NOT running in hybrid Crossfire with the Athlon X2 4850e. The 780G X2 Xfire is the 780G with a Radeon 3450 running in Hybrid Graphics with Crossfire enabled. The 780G X2 is the 780G chipset with the Athlon X2 4850e.

Well with all of that out of the way, let's see how the 780G performs. We'll start things off with Epic's Unreal Tournament 3.

As you can see the 780G easily tops the previous generation of integrated graphics and with a Phenom 9600 performs about 16fps better than a 4850e. Hybrid Crossfire doesn't make much of an impact here in Unreal Tournament 3, gaining a few frames per second over just a standard Radeon 3850 graphics card.

Amazingly Crysis is playable on integrated graphics albeit on low settings. We obtained 27.5 fps with the low cost 4850e X2 processor and a 780G and 34.6 with a Phenom 9600 Black Edition. Again hybrid graphics doesn't show a huge gain but that'll change for a few other games.

At medium settings everything takes a big hit but the Hybrid Graphics Radeon 3450 with the X2 4850e comes out on top at 18.1fps, about 20% faster than just the 780G alone.

Here are the tests for the game we were most looking forward to testing, World of Warcraft. We did this with FRAPS and obtained very repeatable results running around a city in the same path. In case you missed it, these are with settings MAXED out in World of Warcraft. That's not saying a whole lot but the fact you can max out every graphic setting in WoW and obtain 23.5fps with a cheaper 4850e X2 or 28.9 fps if you want to overclock is quite excellent for integrated graphics and should allow people to build very cheap WoW PCs. Not only that but WoW shows some of the biggest boosts we've seen yet from Hybrid Graphics. Hybrid Graphics shows 42.1 fps at 1024x768 as opposed to 32fps of only a Radeon 3450, around a 40% gain. The Phenom 9600 doesn't show a huge gain with no real SMP support in WoW.

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Counter-Strike is another mainstream PC title where the 780G's integrated graphics performance will be closely looked at. For the record everything was set to high and color correction was also enabled.  As you can see again we're seeing some great numbers with the Counter-Strike Source engine at fairly high settings. 30.3fps with just a standard 780G and an Athlon X2 4850e and with Phenom 9600 adding on seven. Hybrid Graphics does better at 1600x1200 than at 1280x1024 allowing one to game at a much higher resolution with Counter-Strike: Source.

id remains the last holdout with purely Open GL graphics engine but even that looks to be possibly be changing with their new game engine. For now though Open GL is in use with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Here at normal settings and at low resolutions the 780G is not quite playable. You can go to even lower graphics settings but it doesn't look too great. If you're wanting to play Quake Wars online you'll either have to drop to the lowest settings with the 780G or upgrade to a better graphics card. That said performance still easily outclasses the previous generation of integrated graphics.

Battlefield 2 is a very popular shooter that hits both the mainstream and hardcore PC gamer market and as such we thought it was important to run through a benchmark of it. We obtained this in a run through with FRAPS. As you can see the 780G is more than playable at "High Settings" with no AA enabled coming in at 35fps and the Phenom at 43 fps.

Finally we cap things off with a look at Futuremark's synthetic benchmark, 3DMark 2006. The numbers aren't very impressive but here we do see a larger boost thanks to Hybrid Graphics.

Lastly let's wrap things up with power consumption and a look at the Southbridge performance.

Here we see some excellent numbers from the 780G 4850e2 combination again which should bode well for those looking for a good home theater PC.

Here we see the 780G come out ahead of Nvidia's 630a in regards to gigabit performance of the Ethernet port. The 690G lags far behind due to it being 10/100.

With a raptor we saw very similar performance in read tests across all chipsets.

At last ATI seemed to have fixed their problem with USB performance as the 780G comes out on top.

Before we move onto the conclusion there are a few things we'd like to go over. You might notice we don't have a comparison to Intel's integrated graphics and that is because we ran into issues with our test system/out of time. But we can say without any doubt that the 780G's integrated graphics blows it out of the water, trust us on this. Intel has a long way to go integrated graphics and who knows when they might start to take it seriously. The real competition is Nvidia and they as of yet have not released details on their next-gen integrated video.

The other note is that while we attempted to test HD-DVD and Blu-Ray performance we ran into some problems with HDCP so we were not able to though we will definitely return to that soon if it can be resolved. The same goes for SurroundView as we had four monitors ready to go but couldn't get it quite going. We'll explore this later if a solution rears it's head.