FIRST LOOK: NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Performance
by Wesley Fink on September 22, 2005 1:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Our Take
Our first benchmarking tests indicate that buyers have some reason to be excited about NVIDIA's new 6100 Integrated Graphics chipset family. Despite the fact that serious gamers would find any integrated graphics board far too limiting, the great majority of boards that are used in systems are integrated graphics boards. In our head-to-head competition with the ATI RS480, the current integrated performance king, the bottom-of - the-line 6100 outperformed the ATI in almost every benchmark. That certainly means that the 6150, clocked at 475MHz instead of the 6100's 425, should perform even better.
There are always some exceptions. Not surprisingly, ATI integrated graphics is still best in games optimized for ATI, like Half Life 2. However, the 6100 is close enough to the ATI that the 6150 may even obliterate that advantage. Far Cry, optimized for NVIDIA, performs significantly better on NVIDIA 6100 than ATI RS480. NVIDIA performs best in every other game that we tested, and it was the top performer in both 3D benchmarks and the General Performance PCMark2005.
It should also be pointed out that NVIDIA is just introducing AMD integrated graphics, while ATI has integrated graphics solutions for both AMD and Intel platforms. The great majority of integrated graphics boards are now based on the poorer-performing Intel platform, so that fact alone will keep ATI's market share of integrated graphics high for the time being.
While we are excited about the improved integrated graphics performance within the NVIDIA 6100 family, this is not to say integrated graphics have completely arrived. Who would really want to play Doom 3 at 24FPS at 800x600 - and that's with no eye candy. However, by lowering detail and resolution, you should be able to find a playable 640x480 or 800x600 in most games. However, if you want better detail or higher resolution, you need to use a better video card. There is even good news here as NVIDIA mirrors ATI in now giving the user the option to run integrated graphics and a PCIe video card at the same time.
The Biostar TForce 6100-939 may not use the top-line 6150/430 combo, but it does extremely well with the 6100/410. The overclocking and memory tweaking options were surprisingly good. The Biostar has enough flexibility to satisfy many users, and it even has the voltage adjustment options that seem to be the last thing to appear on value boards. The TForce 6100 was fast, stable, trouble-free in our brief testing, and extremely flexible - particularly for a micro ATX integrated graphics motherboard. This Biostar would make a great foundation for a cheap system with decent performance, though it is missing the desired options that would make it a good multimedia box.
All-in-all, the NVIDIA 6100 is a decent integrated graphics solution and the new performance leader in AMD integrated graphics. It would have been even better if NVIDIA had made it 4 pixel pipelines instead of two, but the performance and options at the higher end does make the NVIDIA first choice among AMD integrated graphics solutions - at least until the next round from ATI.
Our first benchmarking tests indicate that buyers have some reason to be excited about NVIDIA's new 6100 Integrated Graphics chipset family. Despite the fact that serious gamers would find any integrated graphics board far too limiting, the great majority of boards that are used in systems are integrated graphics boards. In our head-to-head competition with the ATI RS480, the current integrated performance king, the bottom-of - the-line 6100 outperformed the ATI in almost every benchmark. That certainly means that the 6150, clocked at 475MHz instead of the 6100's 425, should perform even better.
There are always some exceptions. Not surprisingly, ATI integrated graphics is still best in games optimized for ATI, like Half Life 2. However, the 6100 is close enough to the ATI that the 6150 may even obliterate that advantage. Far Cry, optimized for NVIDIA, performs significantly better on NVIDIA 6100 than ATI RS480. NVIDIA performs best in every other game that we tested, and it was the top performer in both 3D benchmarks and the General Performance PCMark2005.
It should also be pointed out that NVIDIA is just introducing AMD integrated graphics, while ATI has integrated graphics solutions for both AMD and Intel platforms. The great majority of integrated graphics boards are now based on the poorer-performing Intel platform, so that fact alone will keep ATI's market share of integrated graphics high for the time being.
While we are excited about the improved integrated graphics performance within the NVIDIA 6100 family, this is not to say integrated graphics have completely arrived. Who would really want to play Doom 3 at 24FPS at 800x600 - and that's with no eye candy. However, by lowering detail and resolution, you should be able to find a playable 640x480 or 800x600 in most games. However, if you want better detail or higher resolution, you need to use a better video card. There is even good news here as NVIDIA mirrors ATI in now giving the user the option to run integrated graphics and a PCIe video card at the same time.
The Biostar TForce 6100-939 may not use the top-line 6150/430 combo, but it does extremely well with the 6100/410. The overclocking and memory tweaking options were surprisingly good. The Biostar has enough flexibility to satisfy many users, and it even has the voltage adjustment options that seem to be the last thing to appear on value boards. The TForce 6100 was fast, stable, trouble-free in our brief testing, and extremely flexible - particularly for a micro ATX integrated graphics motherboard. This Biostar would make a great foundation for a cheap system with decent performance, though it is missing the desired options that would make it a good multimedia box.
All-in-all, the NVIDIA 6100 is a decent integrated graphics solution and the new performance leader in AMD integrated graphics. It would have been even better if NVIDIA had made it 4 pixel pipelines instead of two, but the performance and options at the higher end does make the NVIDIA first choice among AMD integrated graphics solutions - at least until the next round from ATI.
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Josh7289 - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
ATI is losing...badly.Their last hope is R520 and its variants. I can't wait for "real" benchmarks. I really want to see how these new cards compare to Nvidia's...and at what prices.
ST - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
Can you get power consumption #'s for the system? These new generation of nvidia integrated graphics seems to make an ideal htpc setup. Speaking of which, CPU utilization with video playback (wmv9,h.264, etc.) would be nice too! :)Sunbird - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
"There is even good news here as NVIDIA mirrors ATI in now giving the user the option to run integrated graphics and a PCIe video card at the same time."That makes my heart happy :) What about you guys?
formulav8 - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
Looks like the board comes with about all overclocking features. I was wondering why there was no overclocking done with the board or even the gpu if its even possible?Or are the overclocking pages there and I just overlooked it??
Jason
Wesley Fink - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
We will do Overclocking tests on a future 6150/430 board in the future. We did try to use Coolbits to push the 6100 clock of 425 to the 6150's 475. The utility shows the correct GPU clock and a Memory Clock on the shared memory of 0. It appears Coolbits is working, but every frequency setting we tried above 425 failed. Apparently a new GPU OC utility is needed for the integrated graphics.coutch - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
...that the Northbridge and Southbridge are passively cooled. I hope some manufacturers see the potential for these in Home Theatre PCs and create some models with decent TV-out & SPDIF audio output in a small MicroATX format.MercenaryForHire - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
From the article: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">NVIDIA Announces AMD Integrated GraphicsYour wish should be in the process of being granted. :)
- M4H
neogodless - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
How do these integrated chips compare to the budget add-in boards? A lot of Dell desktop systems default to the Radeon X300SE, so that is one such card I'd like to see compared.MercenaryForHire - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
Excellent question.Wesley, any chance of spinning some numbers from the http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2427">Xpress 200 vs. GMA 950 article to give some comparasion numbers? I'm sure many people are interested to see where the 6100 stands with respect to the 6200TC lineup.
- M4H
Wesley Fink - Thursday, September 22, 2005 - link
There are useful benchmarks for the GMA950, ATI X200, and 6200 at the same 800x600 resolution in our review at http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2427">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2427. While we agree comparison to the X300 would be useful, we thought you'd appreciate access to the first benchmarks from a retail GeForce 6100 board. We got the board yesterday afternoon and had a review up this morning.We will be doing further testing and comparisons as we receive 6100/6150 boards and systems based on these chipsets.