The IGP Chronicles Part 3: NVIDIA's GeForce 9300
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on October 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
A New Graphics Core
With a smaller manufacturing process, NVIDIA could cram more into the GeForce 9300. While the 80nm GeForce 8200 and 8300 featured 8 SPs, the GeForce 9300 and 9400 have twice that: 16 stream processors. Compared to discrete cards this isn't much of course; the table below shows how the GeForce 9300 stacks up to NVIDIA's own discrete solutions:
| NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO | NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT | |
| Shader Processors | 16 | 192 | 112 |
96 |
32 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 450MHz | 576MHz | 600MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz | 550MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1.2GHz | 1.242GHz | 1.5GHz |
1.375GHz |
1.4GHz | 1.35GHz |
Yeah, integrated graphics still pretty much sucks for any real gaming. What we want is at least 9500 GT class of performance, and what we're getting is something below a 9400 GT (once you factor in memory bandwidth limitations). Compared to other IGPs however, NVIDIA has finally closed the gap between itself and AMD's 780G. Look at the specs:
| AMD 790GX | AMD 780G | Intel G45 | Intel G35 | NVIDIA GeForce 9400 | NVIDIA GeForce 9300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8300 | NVIDIA GeForce 8200 | |
| Graphics | Radeon HD 3300 | Radeon HD 3200 | GMA X4500 |
GMA X3500 |
GeForce 9400 mGPU | GeForce 9300 mGPU | GeForce 8300 mGPU | GeForce 8200 mGPU |
| Core Clock | 700MHz | 500MHz | 800MHz | 667MHz | 580MHz Core / 1.4GHz Shader | 450MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader | 500MHz Core / 1.5GHz Shader |
500MHz Core / 1.2GHz Shader |
| Shader Processors | 8 (5-way) | 8 (5-way) | 10 |
8 |
16 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Full H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2 HW Decode | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
While AMD can crank through a peak of 40 instructions per clock, that's very much a best case scenario figure. NVIDIA should have no problems retiring 16 instructions per clock and with its SPs running at 2.4x the speed of AMD's in the 780G, NVIDIA should not only be able to equal AMD's performance but surpass it in most games.
As we saw with the GeForce 8200 and 8300 series, the only difference between the 9300 and 9400 are clock speeds (450MHz/1.2GHz vs. 580MHz/1.4GHz). And just as we saw with the GeForce 8200/8300, we had no problems overclocking our GeForce 9300 to 9400 clock speeds. The 9300 will be the chipset to look at; the 9400 is simply a way of getting more money out of the consumer.
Dual-Link DVI is supported so 2560x1600 is available... but only if the board manufacturer supports it. The ASUS board we tested with does not support DL DVI unfortunately. DisplayPort and standard VGA are also supported, making for a very nice array of output options on the I/O plane:
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Badkarma - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Why would it be impossible to stream media? Most media streams are only a fraction of 100Mbit ethernet, even a full Blu-ray disc rarely hits 20+Mbit. The CPU usage charts for network traffic in this review are for full thoroughput tests, the NIC will never come close to pushing that much traffic when streaming media.Zstream - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
I stream 300mbs/sec all the time on my HTPC with my gig Intel nic. I guess you never streamed across multiple devices. It is called VOD, if you do not believe me look at the newest tivo.R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
Is this the chipset that nvidia is supposed to have worked with Via on to ensure Nano support?A HP mininote v2 using Nano and this mGPU would be an awesome product that would take a dump on every other netbook from a great height!
Hlafordlaes - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
That's my understanding, too. I was wondering what the delay was caused by, now my guess is that Apple wanted the exclusive for launch. Let's hope some new mini-ITX 2.0 Nano boards with this chipset will appear soon.R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
A lot of netbook newsites are reporting drastic price cuts in the mininote 2133, which is fueling speculation that a v2 may be due out soon.As it happens; there is already a petition requesting HP use the Nano + MCP79 combo in a future v2 mininote:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mininote/petition.ht...">http://www.petitiononline.com/mininote/petition.ht...
R3MF - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - link
This chipset in ULV form is the one being used in the new MacbookAir, so there is no reason why it couldn't be used in netbooks like the HP Mininote, as adequately demonstrated in the power consumption page of this preview.R3MF - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
Do you have any thoughts or speculations you would like to share on whether this is the fabled Via Nano integrated chipset?It would be big news for those of us awaiting a powerful HP mininote v2..........