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GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H,
AMD PHENOM 9500, and AMD ATHLON X2 4850e
 
Conclusion
The 780G from AMD is definitely a powerful IGP
chipset. Its 3D graphics prowess is nothing to
sneeze at, and its performance with the latest AMD
processors showed improvement over the previous
generation. Now that the SB700 is here, we're
assured of better stability and increased efficiency
among other improvements.
The number of ports is almost dizzying, and we
found ourselves trying to find one port or connector
that was missing - sorry, its all there! The
PCIe 1x slot is placed in the best spot - above the
16x, allowing users to have a dual-slot video card
but not lose the PCIe 1x, and still have the 2nd
PCI-33 slot. However, we still couldn't get a
straight explanation as to why the DVI and HDMI
outputs do not work with our Dell 2405FPW LCD.
The results show that the Phenom is a crippled
yet strong competitor with plenty of potential.
It ran best when the TLB patch was disabled, but yet
was not significantly better than the 4850e in many
tests. Worse, you'll never know when your
unpatched Phenom gets into a race condition and just
falls apart.
One particular test, the WinRAR test, showed the
effect of the TLB patch in a dramatic fashion - 5x
more throughput with it off. And as a
comparison, the 4850e was about 60% of the Phenom's
score. That's not too exciting considering the
4850e is a 2.5GHz processor with 2 cores, while the
Phenom is a quad-core CPU at 2.2GHz, but with
DDR2-1066 memory.
As for power consumption, the Phenom used twice
the energy as the 4850e. But looking at the
4850e by itself in the Gigabyte board, it is a
frugal consumer of electricity indeed. In the
near future, this system will be tested as a
multimedia workhorse. Then, we shall see how
it fares against other IGPs in DVD, and HD video
rendering, power consumption, and overall ease of
use.
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
AMD Phenom 9500
AMD Athlon X2 4850e
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