Hello People.
I am back with another short review for you guys. Today we will be taking a quick look at the new XFX nForce 8300 motherboard. This is one of the latest offering for the AMD’s AM2/AM2+ socket processors from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA recently unveiled their plans for new chipset supporting Hybrid SLI functionality. These were 750a and 780a respectively. The nForce 8300 chipset has almost same set of features on paper as that of 750a. But 8300 is targeted at the value / HTPC segment.
Let’s have a look at this product.
[BREAK=Features & Specifications]
First let’s go through the specification and feature set of this motherboard and chipset.
KEY FEATURES
GeForce® 8300 Motherboard
• AMD Socket AM2+ CPU's up to 95W
• AMD Phenom, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64
• NVIDIA HybridSLI Technology*
• First motherboard series with onboard graphics to support DirectX10 out of the box
• Rear panel clear CMOS button and LED display
• Dual BIOS with preset overclocking
• MicroATX formfactor
• Silent cooling with heatpipes
• PureVideo HD Technology
• PCI Express 2.0 support
• Up to 6 Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s drives
• Up to 2 PATA drives (Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33)
• DDR2 1066/800/667/533
• Native Gigabit Ethernet connection
• Up to 10 USA ports
• NVIDIA FIrstPacket™ Technology
• NVIDIA MediaShield™ Technology
*Requires HybridSLI capable components.
Onboard Graphics
• Up to 256MB DDR2 memory
• HDMI + DVI with HDCP & VGA
• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 3.0 Engine
• NVIDIA® nView™ Multi-Display Technology
• NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0 Technology
• DirectX® 10 support
• OpenGL® 1.5 Optimization and Support
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD support
On paper, it seems really feature packed.
Lets move onto the motherboard itself.
[BREAK=The Motherboard]
Let’s move onto the motherboard.
The bundle is very basic. You get the motherboard, backplate, IDE and SATA cables, CD and tiny 4 page manual.
The board itself is a thing of beauty to look at. Its absolutely beautiful looking. If you are one of those who keep their LAN party / HTPC rigs in a cabinet with transparent side window, it will look amazing.
The layout is little unusual as you can see from the picture.
The memory is above the CPU socket. This is what I was used to seeing in the Nforce 4 days ( DFI anyone?
). But overall, the socket area is clean. The CPU has 4 phase power supply.
[BREAK=The Motherboard Contd.]
The northbridge is covered with the small square heatsink which. The PWM mosfets are also covered with nice and big heatsink which is connected to the northbrige through a heatpipe.
All the heatsinks, and heatpipes have cool chrome finish which honestly looks great.
The location of SATA ports is spot on. Even with big dual slot GPU like HD4870 and GTX 260, you will be able to use all 6 available SATA ports without any problem.
There is also 3 extra USB headers on the motherboard.
The backplate has 4 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, DVI and VGA ports, eSATA port, Gigabit Lan port, HD Audio connectors, PS2 ports for mouse and keyboard.
In addition to all this, you have diagnostic LED indicator and CMOS clear button on the backplate as well which is really nice touch. You won’t have to open the cabinet in case of unrecoverable overclock failure.
Even built quality and feel of the motherboard is top notch. No cheap frills here. The RAM lock clips are good quality and does not feel cheap.
Lets move onto the motherboard bios.
[BREAK=The bios]
The motherboard bios is quiet comprehensive. You get everything you will want from a enthusiast motherboard. The motherboard does support the AMD Phenom quad core CPU. The motherboard in past were not designed well enough to overclock the Phenom which resulted in death of the motherboard.
XFX has taken cautious approach to Phenom as well. The motherboard upon detection of Phenom, restricts the major voltage ranges. It caps the vcore adjustment to 1.45v which is quiet less than what it will allow with AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. The Athlon voltage range is all the way upto 1.9+V. Same thing is observed on Chipset voltage control as well. With Phenom your options are limited. This is probably done to protect the motherboard and to avoid user from destroying this motherboard by pushing it too much with Phenom. Quiet understandable as internet is full of horror stories of motherboard blowout while attempting the Phenom overclocking.
I am stating this so that readers are not misinformed about voltage ranges by seeing the BIOS screenshots below. These are with the Phenom 9750 and hence the limited range.
So the motherboard has what it takes to be a really good overclocker with Athlon 64.
Here are the bios photos.
[BREAK=Test Setup & How we tested]
Test System
Processor: AMD Phenom 9750
Motherboard: XFX Geforce 8300
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
Power Supply Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W
HDD: 320GB Seagate
Graphics Card: Onboard GFX and HD4870 for quick 3D performance tests.
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3 and Windows Vista X64 ( Vista was used for gaming tests )
How we tested.
I did all the tests in the stock motherboard and with onboard GPU solution first. We do not have comparable AMD system to compare these results against. So you get the raw data here.
I will not compare the results against an Intel solution as this is not the processor review. It’s the motherboard review and hence the decision.
What I will do with the CPU and memory performance it to provide you with the screenshots of the Everest benchmark suit with the comparative numbers of other systems.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition CPU performance]
Everest CPU performance.
First lets see all the CPU performance results of Everest Ultimate Edition.
As you can see, the results are comparable to other Phenom processor systems. Its observed with AMD platform that the performance hardly varies with the change in motherboard thanks to on chip memory controller. The performance is good, infact great when you see where Phenom 9500 is.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance]
Everest Memory Performance
Again, the results are comparable to other Phenom system in the Everest Database.
[BREAK=3D Tests]
3D Tests
Now here is the real kicker. I am perfectly aware that this is not meant to be a really good onboard GPU solution. But I ran the 3DMark 2006 anyway. At default resolution, it was painfully slow. Even lowering the resolution to 1280x720 did not help much.
There is no real point in even mentioning the scores here. But for the sake of stating it, the SM2.0 and SM3.0 scores were 49 and 52 respectively with the 3D score of 148 even at below default resolution of 1280x720.
Which clearly states that onboard GPU solution is no good for gaming. This was observed in games as well with none of the modern games coming even close to being playable. The frame rate was so bad that there is absolutely no point in even benchmarking the modern games.
This came as expected result to be honest.
Adding HD4870 changed the things.
I ran the quick tests of GRID, Crysis and Mass Effect with HD4850 and results were encouraging. As I am not going to do comparative study with another system, I am stating them below. Everything was maxed out in all games.
Race Driver GRID 1680x1050 8xMSAA
Min: 41
Max: 109
Avg: 76
Mass Effect 1680x1050 4XAA 8XAF
Min: 30
Max: 48
Avg: 40
Crysis 1680x1050 DX10 Very High
Min: 16
Max: 26.2
Avg: 21
If you see all these numbers, these are very close what I can achieve on my system which is E7200 clocked at almost 4Ghz and top of the line X48 motherboard.
This only confirms that the GPU performance of this board is very much acceptable.
[BREAK=Multimedia Experience]
Multimedia Experience.
The people who will be buying this board will be very keen on this segment. I ran standard DVDs, VCDs, Xvid, AVI, WMV and also few HD files on this motherboard.
This motherboard’s onboard solution handled all the standard definition files with ease and also 720P x264 encodes well. There was a little issue of seeking while playing 720P x264 files. When you see the file, the audio will resume immediately, but video will take 4-5 seconds to appear.
1080P x264 files failed completely. It will play those files in windowed mode on WMP and WMP Classic and also MPC Home Cinema. But it failed to play these files in full screen mode in all rendering mode options. The display will simply start to flicker and turn into garbage while audio playback continued.
This clearly shows the limitation of the onboard solution. You would want to add a discrete graphics card like HD3450 or 8600GT to enhance your media playback capabilities.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final thoughts.
This board is a mixed bag of good and bad. It’s a good motherboard with great built quality, looks, bios, overclocking and feature set. But its bad onboard video solution spoils the party to some extent. Addition of Hybrid SLI makes this board attractive proposition to those who want to build mATX portable gaming systems. They can add Hybrid SLI supported card like 9800GTX+ or GT200 series card and build a system which uses very low power at idle and still pack quiet a bit of punch while gaming.
The overclocking options are extensive for Athlon 64 users. And decent enough for Phenom processors. I was able to take my Phenom to 2.8Ghz without too much trouble 100% stable.
If it wasn’t for the Hybrid SLI and overclocking capability of this board, it would have fared poorlyagainst AMD’s 780G chipset boards which offer much better onboard video solution and media playback capabilities.
This is perfect board for those who want to build a compact AMD based gaming and HTPC system.
If you want pure HTPC oriented system without discrete graphics solution, look elsewhere. But if you plan to add the GPU to this board, then it makes attractive purchase.
Pros
• Good looks
• Good and clean layout
• Good built quality
• Extensive bios options
• Good feature set
• Support for Hybrid SLI
Cons
• Really Poor onboard GPU performance.
Our thanks to Rashi Peripherals Pvt Ltd. And XFX for providing this motherboard for testing and my sincere apologies as well for delay in the review.
Review Notes : You might have noticed less pics than what you are used to in my reviews and less material. This is partially because of the hard drive failure 4-5 days ago which resulted in loss of most of my review write up and many pictures on the hard drive. And as the motherboard was returned, I was left with the limited number of pics which were left intact on the cameras memory card and results which I had noted down on the paper and thankfully I had already uploaded the Everest results online. This also resulted in loss of hard drive performance data. But on 7200.10 drive, the burst rate was close to 225MBps and Avg Read speed of 67MBps which is almost exactly same as what I had experienced on all other boards. But as that material no longer exists, I did not add these numbers in the review but pointing them out here in the review notes.
My apologies for the same but there was not much I could do about it.
Thanks for reading and do leave your comments.
Shripad signing out until the next time.
I am back with another short review for you guys. Today we will be taking a quick look at the new XFX nForce 8300 motherboard. This is one of the latest offering for the AMD’s AM2/AM2+ socket processors from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA recently unveiled their plans for new chipset supporting Hybrid SLI functionality. These were 750a and 780a respectively. The nForce 8300 chipset has almost same set of features on paper as that of 750a. But 8300 is targeted at the value / HTPC segment.
Let’s have a look at this product.
[BREAK=Features & Specifications]
First let’s go through the specification and feature set of this motherboard and chipset.
KEY FEATURES
GeForce® 8300 Motherboard
• AMD Socket AM2+ CPU's up to 95W
• AMD Phenom, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64
• NVIDIA HybridSLI Technology*
• First motherboard series with onboard graphics to support DirectX10 out of the box
• Rear panel clear CMOS button and LED display
• Dual BIOS with preset overclocking
• MicroATX formfactor
• Silent cooling with heatpipes
• PureVideo HD Technology
• PCI Express 2.0 support
• Up to 6 Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s drives
• Up to 2 PATA drives (Ultra DMA 133/100/66/33)
• DDR2 1066/800/667/533
• Native Gigabit Ethernet connection
• Up to 10 USA ports
• NVIDIA FIrstPacket™ Technology
• NVIDIA MediaShield™ Technology
*Requires HybridSLI capable components.
Onboard Graphics
• Up to 256MB DDR2 memory
• HDMI + DVI with HDCP & VGA
• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 3.0 Engine
• NVIDIA® nView™ Multi-Display Technology
• NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0 Technology
• DirectX® 10 support
• OpenGL® 1.5 Optimization and Support
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD support
On paper, it seems really feature packed.
Lets move onto the motherboard itself.
[BREAK=The Motherboard]
Let’s move onto the motherboard.
The bundle is very basic. You get the motherboard, backplate, IDE and SATA cables, CD and tiny 4 page manual.
The board itself is a thing of beauty to look at. Its absolutely beautiful looking. If you are one of those who keep their LAN party / HTPC rigs in a cabinet with transparent side window, it will look amazing.
The layout is little unusual as you can see from the picture.
The memory is above the CPU socket. This is what I was used to seeing in the Nforce 4 days ( DFI anyone?
). But overall, the socket area is clean. The CPU has 4 phase power supply.[BREAK=The Motherboard Contd.]
The northbridge is covered with the small square heatsink which. The PWM mosfets are also covered with nice and big heatsink which is connected to the northbrige through a heatpipe.
All the heatsinks, and heatpipes have cool chrome finish which honestly looks great.
The location of SATA ports is spot on. Even with big dual slot GPU like HD4870 and GTX 260, you will be able to use all 6 available SATA ports without any problem.
There is also 3 extra USB headers on the motherboard.
The backplate has 4 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, DVI and VGA ports, eSATA port, Gigabit Lan port, HD Audio connectors, PS2 ports for mouse and keyboard.
In addition to all this, you have diagnostic LED indicator and CMOS clear button on the backplate as well which is really nice touch. You won’t have to open the cabinet in case of unrecoverable overclock failure.
Even built quality and feel of the motherboard is top notch. No cheap frills here. The RAM lock clips are good quality and does not feel cheap.
Lets move onto the motherboard bios.
[BREAK=The bios]
The motherboard bios is quiet comprehensive. You get everything you will want from a enthusiast motherboard. The motherboard does support the AMD Phenom quad core CPU. The motherboard in past were not designed well enough to overclock the Phenom which resulted in death of the motherboard.
XFX has taken cautious approach to Phenom as well. The motherboard upon detection of Phenom, restricts the major voltage ranges. It caps the vcore adjustment to 1.45v which is quiet less than what it will allow with AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. The Athlon voltage range is all the way upto 1.9+V. Same thing is observed on Chipset voltage control as well. With Phenom your options are limited. This is probably done to protect the motherboard and to avoid user from destroying this motherboard by pushing it too much with Phenom. Quiet understandable as internet is full of horror stories of motherboard blowout while attempting the Phenom overclocking.
I am stating this so that readers are not misinformed about voltage ranges by seeing the BIOS screenshots below. These are with the Phenom 9750 and hence the limited range.
So the motherboard has what it takes to be a really good overclocker with Athlon 64.
Here are the bios photos.
[BREAK=Test Setup & How we tested]
Test System
Processor: AMD Phenom 9750
Motherboard: XFX Geforce 8300
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
Power Supply Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550W
HDD: 320GB Seagate
Graphics Card: Onboard GFX and HD4870 for quick 3D performance tests.
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3 and Windows Vista X64 ( Vista was used for gaming tests )
How we tested.
I did all the tests in the stock motherboard and with onboard GPU solution first. We do not have comparable AMD system to compare these results against. So you get the raw data here.
I will not compare the results against an Intel solution as this is not the processor review. It’s the motherboard review and hence the decision.
What I will do with the CPU and memory performance it to provide you with the screenshots of the Everest benchmark suit with the comparative numbers of other systems.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition CPU performance]
Everest CPU performance.
First lets see all the CPU performance results of Everest Ultimate Edition.
As you can see, the results are comparable to other Phenom processor systems. Its observed with AMD platform that the performance hardly varies with the change in motherboard thanks to on chip memory controller. The performance is good, infact great when you see where Phenom 9500 is.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance]
Everest Memory Performance
Again, the results are comparable to other Phenom system in the Everest Database.
[BREAK=3D Tests]
3D Tests
Now here is the real kicker. I am perfectly aware that this is not meant to be a really good onboard GPU solution. But I ran the 3DMark 2006 anyway. At default resolution, it was painfully slow. Even lowering the resolution to 1280x720 did not help much.
There is no real point in even mentioning the scores here. But for the sake of stating it, the SM2.0 and SM3.0 scores were 49 and 52 respectively with the 3D score of 148 even at below default resolution of 1280x720.
Which clearly states that onboard GPU solution is no good for gaming. This was observed in games as well with none of the modern games coming even close to being playable. The frame rate was so bad that there is absolutely no point in even benchmarking the modern games.
This came as expected result to be honest.
Adding HD4870 changed the things.
I ran the quick tests of GRID, Crysis and Mass Effect with HD4850 and results were encouraging. As I am not going to do comparative study with another system, I am stating them below. Everything was maxed out in all games.
Race Driver GRID 1680x1050 8xMSAA
Min: 41
Max: 109
Avg: 76
Mass Effect 1680x1050 4XAA 8XAF
Min: 30
Max: 48
Avg: 40
Crysis 1680x1050 DX10 Very High
Min: 16
Max: 26.2
Avg: 21
If you see all these numbers, these are very close what I can achieve on my system which is E7200 clocked at almost 4Ghz and top of the line X48 motherboard.
This only confirms that the GPU performance of this board is very much acceptable.
[BREAK=Multimedia Experience]
Multimedia Experience.
The people who will be buying this board will be very keen on this segment. I ran standard DVDs, VCDs, Xvid, AVI, WMV and also few HD files on this motherboard.
This motherboard’s onboard solution handled all the standard definition files with ease and also 720P x264 encodes well. There was a little issue of seeking while playing 720P x264 files. When you see the file, the audio will resume immediately, but video will take 4-5 seconds to appear.
1080P x264 files failed completely. It will play those files in windowed mode on WMP and WMP Classic and also MPC Home Cinema. But it failed to play these files in full screen mode in all rendering mode options. The display will simply start to flicker and turn into garbage while audio playback continued.
This clearly shows the limitation of the onboard solution. You would want to add a discrete graphics card like HD3450 or 8600GT to enhance your media playback capabilities.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final thoughts.
This board is a mixed bag of good and bad. It’s a good motherboard with great built quality, looks, bios, overclocking and feature set. But its bad onboard video solution spoils the party to some extent. Addition of Hybrid SLI makes this board attractive proposition to those who want to build mATX portable gaming systems. They can add Hybrid SLI supported card like 9800GTX+ or GT200 series card and build a system which uses very low power at idle and still pack quiet a bit of punch while gaming.
The overclocking options are extensive for Athlon 64 users. And decent enough for Phenom processors. I was able to take my Phenom to 2.8Ghz without too much trouble 100% stable.
If it wasn’t for the Hybrid SLI and overclocking capability of this board, it would have fared poorlyagainst AMD’s 780G chipset boards which offer much better onboard video solution and media playback capabilities.
This is perfect board for those who want to build a compact AMD based gaming and HTPC system.
If you want pure HTPC oriented system without discrete graphics solution, look elsewhere. But if you plan to add the GPU to this board, then it makes attractive purchase.
Pros
• Good looks
• Good and clean layout
• Good built quality
• Extensive bios options
• Good feature set
• Support for Hybrid SLI
Cons
• Really Poor onboard GPU performance.
Our thanks to Rashi Peripherals Pvt Ltd. And XFX for providing this motherboard for testing and my sincere apologies as well for delay in the review.
Review Notes : You might have noticed less pics than what you are used to in my reviews and less material. This is partially because of the hard drive failure 4-5 days ago which resulted in loss of most of my review write up and many pictures on the hard drive. And as the motherboard was returned, I was left with the limited number of pics which were left intact on the cameras memory card and results which I had noted down on the paper and thankfully I had already uploaded the Everest results online. This also resulted in loss of hard drive performance data. But on 7200.10 drive, the burst rate was close to 225MBps and Avg Read speed of 67MBps which is almost exactly same as what I had experienced on all other boards. But as that material no longer exists, I did not add these numbers in the review but pointing them out here in the review notes.
My apologies for the same but there was not much I could do about it.
Thanks for reading and do leave your comments.
Shripad signing out until the next time.
