NVIDIA GeForce 8300 Chipset Review

Thu 2008-07-03 - Posted by Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

The Tech Report has posted an in-depth look at the new NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset, which is intended for microATX AM2+ motherboards.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The GeForce 8300's USB performance is excellent and its disk controller works properly, which is more than can be said of the 780G. We like the integrated Gigabit Ethernet, too, if only because it should prevent motherboard makers from skimping in the networking department. That's about it for highlights, though.

Sure, the GeForce offers decent gaming performance and effective Blu-ray playback acceleration. But the 780G is better on both fronts, and its power consumption appears to be lower. As our WorldBench results illustrate, the two chipsets offer identical performance with common desktop applications, too. There isn't much for Nvidia to hang its hat on this time around, then.”

Chipsets like this one cater to the home theater PC market, and must have a) low power consumption and b) excellent video playback. Regrettably, on both fronts, the GeForce 8300 is surpassed by the AMD 780G chipset. Now these shortcomings could be overlooked if NVIDIA’s solution was cheaper than AMD’s, but currently, motherboards based on either chipset are priced pretty much identically.

Click here to read the full review.

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