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.

Here are the spec from Asus'.

Overclock the board we did not go very far at all and were limited by BIOS options with no multiplier control for the CPU and limited voltage adjustments. We've pushed Phenoms far further and the GeForce 8200 unfortunately is not a good overclocker. We'll see how the GeForce 8300 stacks up later. We were able to eek out only a little over 100Mhz on our Phenom X4 9350e test system which is probably the worst overclock we've seen on an Asus board which are usually excellent or the best. We blame Nvidia's chipset though and not them.

We tested with the 0409 BIOS which was the latest at the time though luckily Asus' continues to update it. As mentioned in overclocking the BIOS is also one of the more limited ones we've seen from Asus with no ability to adjust the CPU multiplier and limited adjustment of the voltages. The board did though boot back quickly from failed overclocks although we think more of these options should be in the BIOS.

Let's move onto performance.

Here is our new test system for integrated video using AMD's new 65W Phenom X4 9350e.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 with Catalyst 8.6 drivers and nForce 18.11.

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We'll start things off with easily the most demanding game on the mark right now, Crytek's Crysis. Obviously we didn't run it at high but tested it at "Low" settings which still look quite good. Here we see the GeForce 8200 does fairly well for integrated video but has steep competition from AMD's 780G.

We decided to test more mainstream titles since those using IGP will be playing those. World of Warcraft brought good results from both boards at 1280x720 though isn't quite playable with settings maxed at 1680x1050. Still this is quite an improvement over previous iteration of integrated graphics for both companies.

Counter-Strike sees a large margin between the two chipsets although we were running the game at the highest settings possible they are respectable scores for that.

3DMark is a popular benchmark though a synthetic one and here we see again the 780G on top.

The Southbridge is just as important so we ran a few hard drive, USB, and Gigabit tests on the motherboards.

PCMark shows similar results though likely the boost came from the graphics card rather than overall system performance.

Here we see the two motherboards are neck and neck at least with out hard drive using HDTach's test though the edge goes to the GeForce 8200.

The USB test again goes to Nvidia seeing a significantly faster transfer of files with their USB performance using a Western Digital Raptor through Thermaltake's dock station.

Our Gigabit speed test is a little more evenly matched but again the GeForce 8200 is the winner of Southbridge performance overall.