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.