The IGP Chronicles Part 2: AMD 780G vs. Intel G45 vs. NVIDIA GeForce 8200

The Motherboards

We've got a quick spotlight here on the boards we used to represent the AMD and NVIDIA chipsets included in this article.

NVIDIA GeForce 8200 from Biostar

Representing the GF8200 product family today is the Biostar TF-8200 A2+, which is part of Biostar’s T-Series family that offers a blend of performance features at a near value price point. This board features an ATX layout, support for NVIDIA Hybrid SLI, a feature rich BIOS, and a price of $89.99. Major competitors in the GF8200 arena include the ASUS M3N78-VM HDMI, MSI K9N2GM-FD, ECS GF8200A, and Zotac GF8200.

The TF-8200 A2+ is a feature rich GF8200 board with an OC friendly BIOS, Gigabit LAN via the almost universal Realtek RTL8111C, full RAID support along with six SATA ports via the GF8200, PATA support from the GF8200, and HD audio via the Realtek ALC888S. One interesting fact about SATA support from the GF8200/8300 series is that ports five and six only support AHCI or RAID mode; otherwise you are limited to four SATA ports.

In our opinion, Biostar provided an excellent layout with an old school AMD memory slot configuration. When utilizing a dual slot video card, the user is still left with with two free PCIe x1 and three PCI slots. The chipset heatsink designs did not interfere with a variety of peripherals that we installed including several popular heatsinks and video cards. Our only complaint would be the GF8200 runs slightly hot under load so we recommend active cooling (case fan or radial CPU fan design) in order to keep the chipset and PWM components cool.

Biostar utilizes an excellent 4-phase power delivery system along with quality capacitors throughout the board that resulted in very stable operation with everything from a 9950BE down to a BE-2400. The inclusion of PS/2 ports for a keyboard or mouse is a nice touch as is output support for VGA, HDMI, or DVI-D along with power and restart buttons. DVI-D support is limited to single link, so 1920x1200 is going to be the maximum desktop resolution. This is a limitation of the NVIDIA GF8200 chipset.

Pros/Cons

We had an interesting time with this board. Up until the latest NVIDIA platform and driver set, our interest in the GF8200 has never been that great. Besides the exclusion of a 5.1 channel HDMI audio setting, things are finally looking up for this chipset. As such, our opinion of the board changed slightly.

All of our AMD based boards today were limited in overclocking to around 250HTT with integrated graphics enabled. We were able to run the GPU shader clock to 1650MHz and the mGPU core clock to 630MHz. Increasing the core clock provided very little benefit, and increasing the shader clocks raised performance anywhere from 2% to 4% on average.

The Biostar board was extremely stable when clocking our 9950BE up to 234HTT, 8750 at 240HTT, and the 4850e at 245HTT with base memory clock set to DDR2-800 with 5-4-4-15 settings. We will delve into additional overclocking with our discrete GPUs shortly, but for those needing a IGP solution with overclocking, this board is recommended.

We had a couple of minor problems that a BIOS update should cure. The keyboard is not available after drive recognition until the Windows startup routine and HTT clocking with the 9350e was difficult. In addition, HDMI video out no longer works with the latest PowerDVD 8 Ultra update 2021a and the 178.13 driver set on this board. Either the EDID information or AACS key update is creating a conflict with the current BIOS. We rolled back to an earlier version and all was fine again for BD playback. Overall, this board did not inspire us but neither did it create any negative feelings during use. Biostar has provided a solid board with a very good feature set that we find hard to fault.