NVIDIA Releases GeForce 9300 Intel Chipset

AMD might have been holding the mATX chipset market for a while, with their 780G and 790GX, but NVIDIA was tired of sitting around and decided to go ahead and release an Intel-based chipset that could compete with Intel's own G45, which we've found has a few issues of its own.

One of NVIDIA's biggest advantages is the integrated graphics, without question. Intel's is lacking in most regards, and gaming performance is no exception. Our friends at the Tech Report have taken the latest NVIDIA chipset for a spin, and found that the gaming performance is far improved over what's available on the G45's X4500HD graphics chip... a nice bonus.

In addition to the graphics capabilities, the board also handles Blu-ray well, and also has some of the best S-ATA and USB performance around... all in addition to having a competitive power consumption (though it is higher than the rest). Geoff doesn't think the board is truly "finished", but it's definitely off on a good start.

Nvidia has the best integrated graphics core for gaming, then. It also has a competent PureVideo HD decode engine that brings creamy smoothness to 1080p Blu-ray playback. And let's not forget that the GeForce 9300 fared very well in our peripheral performance tests, exhibiting excellent SATA throughput and the quickest USB controller of the lot. Even the GeForce 9300's power consumption—a notorious weakness of Nvidia chipsets-is reasonable.

Source: Tech Report

Tech Roundup - October 15, 2008

Motherboards & Processors
• EVGA 790i SLI FTW Digital PWM - Legit Reviews

Displays & Video Cards
• MSI N9800GT - Overclockers Club
• Palit GeForce 9800 GT Super+ 1GB - Benchmark Reviews
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Toxic Vapor-X - Phoronix

Memory & Storage
• Corsair Flash Voyager Mini Flash Drive - Everything USB
• QNAP TS-509 Pro Turbo NAS - Ninjalane
• Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 2.5" 7200 RPM Hard Disk - TweakTown

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Microsoft SideWinder X5 Gaming Mouse - TweakTown
• Ultrasone HFI-680 Headphones - techPowerUp!

Cooling
• Evercool Transformer 6 Heatsink - FrostyTech
• Sunbeam Rheobus Extreme - Dreamware Computers

Chassis & Power Supplies
• AeroCool AeroRacer Pro Case - DragonSteelMods
• Apevia X-Qboii Micro ATX Case - Think Computers
• Lian Li TYR PC-X500 Chassis - Overclock3D
• Sigma Unicorn - Fusion Mods
• Thermaltake V9 Gaming Case - TweakNews
• XSpice Kira 530w - XS Reviews

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Asus Eee 1000H - Overclockers Club
• Nokia XpressMusic 5610 - Digital Trends