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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Geforce9300 - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
Hi guys;Personally, I think Apple is buying all of these chipsets NVidia can make for the moment...
Where I live, in Belgium, only 3 mobos are available with this chipset: The Asus, the Gigabyte, and now there's a new one from DFI: I'ts called the DFI LANPARTY Junior GF9400-T2RS .
So only 3 mobo's... it's what makes me think Apple is eating most of these chipsets right now.
Steve, leave one for me please if you will...
And take care of your health.
Has anyone seen another mobo?
Mr. Anand, any update since the test? Is there a revision 2 which solves the latency problem and so on?
I would like to buy one... I have a low power Pentium 4 631 'Cedar Mill' lying here, and I have everything except a mobo.
So I am kind of waiting to see the stated issues resolved in a certain mobo before buying one.
I was dissapointed by the G45's GPU, so I would prefer to buy an NVidia chipset...
I like to see NVidia being the leader in INtel-mainstream chipsets again!
Thumbs up for NVidia!
Cheers;
Carl
lordbob99 - Thursday, January 29, 2009 - link
I'm currently seeing 7 available Nvidia GeForce 9x00 based motherboards available over at Newegg.com - XFX, Asus, Zotac, MSI, DFI, Gigabyte, and EVGA.Link's not working here for me, but you can paste in: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...=&Sp...
I've been thinking about picking one of these up for a while, but was hoping for an update from anandtech on whether the problems/kinks they mentioned have been worked out yet.
sergev - Friday, January 2, 2009 - link
You say that you tried to keep every part of the system the same as much as possible. Why is it then that you choose a 140 Watt AMD processor and a 95 Watt Intel processor and say that the nvidia 9300/9400 is using less energy than the AMD chipsets?You should have gone with something more the same like a 65 watt core 2 duo and a 65 watt athlon 64x2. That way you could be sure that you have honest results. And performance wise it is ofcourse obvious that the intel systems should perform better because of the ridiculously high end processor. Now there is no way of telling wich one is using less energy!
sidewinderx2 - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
The Asus N10J netbook already has an atom paired with a 9300M GS...dragones - Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...XavierJohn - Monday, October 27, 2008 - link
What is the ship date?Noone seems to be carrying the 9200 or the 9300 motherboards.
aapocketz - Monday, October 27, 2008 - link
I would be interested to know when these motherboards are available, noone is selling them. I am particularly interested in the MSI board.When will more detailed review of these boards be available?
JonnyDough - Monday, October 20, 2008 - link
What we could use is this in a 939/478 form factor with support for both DDR and DDR2 ram. There are a lot of Athlons and P4s out there still with motherboards that have died. With few choices on the market, an powerful and cheap integrated solution would be a great option for old systems. I would still build an HTPC out of my older X2s.XavierJohn - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
It is interesting in this article one person has the DTC 9.8 and the other Pioneer Elite.I currently have Pioneer Elite and was thinking about DTC 9.8. For an HTPC use is the upgrade worth it?
Is it also worth upgrading from 8200 AMD to 9400 Intel for an HTPC? From my understanding, it is not.
Gary Key - Thursday, October 16, 2008 - link
I would upgrade from the VSX-94THX to the DTC 9.8 if I could. ;) From a HTPC perspective, no real reason to upgrade from the 8200 to the 9300.