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
Blu-ray Playback Quality and Performance
We expected Intel's G45 to be the holy grail of HTPC chipsets; unfortunately, driver limitations kept it from fulfilling that role. While the verdict is still out on what G45 may become, Intel's track record with taking care of the HTPC space with its chipsets hasn't been great, as Intel's own blogger will readily admit. (Who, by the way, is an excellent addition to Intel. While the message he carries may not be the most popular within Intel, his understanding of the market is top notch - promote this guy!)
Thus we turn to NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 for hope. Prior to today, your best bet for a solid HTPC solution was to buy an Intel G45 or P45 based motherboard and stick a Radeon HD 4550 in a vacant PCIe slot for proper HDMI, HDCP and 8-channel LPCM support without any issues. Does NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 change that?
An astounding yes.
The Blu-ray decode quality of the GeForce 9300 is identical to the GeForce 8200, which in turn is identical to the G45 and AMD's 780G - as you'd expect. The comparison below is the one we used from Part 2 of the IGP Chronicles:
We've also got full hardware decode for MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 on the GPU itself, which results in very low CPU utilization numbers while playing back Blu-ray and other supported HD content:
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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..........