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.