Nvidia and AMD have had some step competition going up against one another lately with video cards and chipsets. AMD just recently leapfrogged Nvidia when it comes to video cards and had been doing well with their 780G board. Today we're going to take a look at Nvidia's integrated graphics offering, the GeForce 8200, and pit it against AMD's 780G to see who comes out on top and the board we are looking at is the Asus M3N78-EMH HDMI.

The GeForce 8200 was the first AM2+ integrated motherboard from Nvidia which means it brings a number of new features primarily of which is Hypertransport 3 support which was missing from older Nvidia chipsets. This means the HT bus can run at 1.8 or 2GHz that Phenom CPUs support to maximize their potential. The GeForce 8200 MCP supports 12 USB 2.0 ports, DDR2 1066MHz, one PCI Express 2.0 slot, 3 PCI Express 1x slots, 6 SATA drives, two PATA, and Hybrid Power with DVI, HDMI, or VGA connections through the integrated video in addition to 5 standard PCI Slots. The M3N78 we're looking at features four USB ports on board with more via expansion, DVI output, VGA output, and HDMI output on board which will handle any monitor you can throw at it. It features 2 PCI slots, one PCI Express 1x slot, and one 16X PCI Express slot.

As with other cards in the GeForce 8 series the 8200 supports DirecX10 which is the first Nvidia chipset to do so. It uses a 500MHz core clock speed and 16 stream processors at 1.2Ghz. As with the 780a chipset Hybrid SLI is supported though we ran out of time for testing it during this interview. Full decoding of high definition H.264 content is also supported in the new chipset matching AMD's 780G. of which it is the closest competitor.

The Micro ATX board is laid out well with everything easily within reach and not a problem. The CPU power adapter sits near the Socket, the 4 DDR2 slots behind the CPU, 24 pin ATX power there next to six SATA ports. One problem we did have is that the chipset gets exceptionally hot and more cooling might have been beneficial but you shouldn't run into very many problems. One area where there might be is the PATA port near the second PCI slot could be a tight fit if you're using both PCI slots.