| Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H Intel G45 Chipset Review |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 02 September 2008 10:17 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Until this year integrated graphics were still a major problem lacking in ability to play 3D games or decode H.264 content. AMD changed all of that though with the 780G and 790GX and Nvidia also raised the bar on integrated graphics with the GeForce 8200 and 8300 if not quite as high as AMD was able to. Intel's integrated graphics has been notorious at best and a major problem for the game development community given how popular their integrated graphics are. Intel though has a new chipset which looks to quell some of these problems in the G45, their follow up to the G35. We'll be looking at a board based on this new G45 chipset, Gigabyte's GA-EG45M-DS2H.
The Gigabyte board features all the video output connectors you could need
presently with both VGA, DVI, and HDMI output all on the board. Other back panel
connectors include six USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, Firewire port, Gigabit
Ethernet, optical S/PDIF output, and 6 analog audio jacks. Gigabyte also boasts their own unique features for their take on Intel's G45 chipset. The board features their dynamic energy saver technology and 4-gear switching to save power when idle or when as much CPU power is not needed. This is backed up by more efficient and durable components for overclocking with all solid capacitors, ferrite core choke design, and low RDS MOSFETs on RDS. Their dual BIOS feature is here as usual saving you when if a BIOS flash goes poorly, is damaged, or from a virus. The board also features Green Ethernet technology which adjusts power consumption automatically depending on the LAN cable lengths for up to a 10% power savings.
The accessories are a little sparse with no extension bracket but they do include the manual, driver disk, SATA cables, a floppy cable and an IDE cable.
Let's move onto the BIOS.
Here are the specs from Gigabyte. CPU
The BIOS is fairly standard higher-end BIOS with higher turbo and other options for the memory, CPU, and graphics. Overclocking the front-side bus was fairly easy done manually through the BIOS in addition to adjusting the voltage. Memory had to be selected from pre-set values according to how high the front-side bus was for optimal performance. Good job on the BIOS all around though with a lot of options for tweaking. In regards to overclocking we were able to hit 3.2GHz stable with our board at a 1620MHz front-side bus which is quite good for a MicroATX board.
Now let's move onto benchmarks. Here is our current test system.
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit SP1 was our OS with the latest drivers from Intel numbered 1583 and dated late July. Our ATI drivers were beta versions of 8.8 Catalyst drivers and Forceware 175.18 for Nvidia. Since we're dealing with integrated graphics let's start things off with the most popular game of today, World of Warcraft. We used FRAPS in an Elf level where following a repeatable path for this FRAPS capture.
And we're off. Here we see the 790GX come in much higher than the 780G and Hybrid Crossfire with a Radeon 3450 512MB shows phenomenal gains above what we saw previously in HCF with the 780G. The G45 and Nvidia's chipset both do fairly well in this game which isn't too graphically intensive but can't compete with AMD.
Battlefield 2 is definitely playable on the G45 which is a good improvement as you'd hope to see with an older title.
Call of Duty 4 is an incredibly popular and modern shooter from Infinity Ward and a title we had to test. The G45 is definitely not playable here and although the other integrated graphics chipsets don't do as well either except for the 790GX 10.9fps is just unacceptable with such a popular title that normall scales well.
We attempted to benchmark Crysis in DX10 mode but ran across a number of artifacts. Even still we recorded 6fps at 1024x768 with DX10 and it simply would not play at 1280x1024.
3DMark is synthetic but a good way to stress a system. The G45 comes in a few hundred below Nvidia's 780a (basically a GeForce 8300) and over a 1000 points lower than the 790GX.
Here we're surprised to see the G45 again do well on a mainstream title at least, even with full HDR the score even tops Nvidia's integrated graphics.
AMD's QuakeLive is basically Quake 3 in a web browser and does a pretty good job of that. The G45 again does well, more than likely do to the much better Q6600 performance against the Phenom but still tops Nvidia with that boost.
UT3 is another game we tested DX10 with and again the scores were some of the chipsets worst.
Surprisingly if we put Company of Heroes all the way to the lowest settings it is fairly playable on the G45.
We tested Blu-Ray playback with a Lite-On Drive and No Country For Old Men tested with PowerDVD 8. We've heard the G45 H.264 content has had issues and on our side it did not work with the CPU being maxed out and even some dropped frames in the very slow moving cinematography of the film. We couldn't "Print Screen" while PowerDVD 8 was playing so here is a screenshot of task manager with an E6420 after just quitting PowerDVD8 and playing back the film.
Testing the Gigabit Ethernet performance in Sandra it performed quite well at 68MB/s. USB performance was also excellent averaging 38MB/s read with Thermal right's external hard drive holder and an older Western Digital Raptor. Now we'll take a look at power consumption in watts. Idle was taking after three minutes idle in Windows Vista desktop. Load was a combination of 3DMark and Valve's map creator benchmark.
Conclusion: Pricing: Score: 88%
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 03 September 2008 12:51 |
