AMD's 785G Chipset - Revolutionary or Evolutionary?
by Gary Key on August 4, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Setup -
Our primary board for testing today is the Gigabyte GA-MA785GPMT-UD2H that features DDR3 memory support along with 128MB of SidePort memory. We selected the Gigabyte HD 4770 video card for our discrete graphics card duties. The WD VelociRaptor 300GB is our hard drive of choice for secondary storage purposes, while Kingston’s 80GB (Intel X25-M) SSD is our primary drive choice. Pioneers’s BDR-203BKS Blu-ray playback capable drives fills in for optical duties. We purchased OCZ’s impressive DDR3-1600 C7 AMD 4GB kit for DDR3 memory duties along with GSkill’s Trident DDR2-1066 C5 4GB kit. We chose the retail coolers for our standard results.
Our power supply choice is the excellent Corsair 520HX, and considering our standard test bed is limited to a single video card this power supply works perfectly. Our case choice is the Lian-Li PC-V351B. We utilized the ASUS VH242H 23.6" 1920x1080 LCD monitor for display duties. Finally, we have dropped Vista 64-bit for good and moved to the Windows 7 64-bit Retail release for our testing today - it just works better.
There are several 785G motherboards available for sale as of today with additional models arriving at various resellers over the next two weeks. We just received several boards from MSI, ASRock, ECS, ASUS, Gigabyte, Biostar, and Foxconn that will be part of an 785G roundup next week. In the meantime, for the more performance oriented crowd we highly suggest you take a look at our primary board from Gigabyte today or the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO and MSI 785GM-E65. Prices for the 785G products should range from $75 up to $100 depending on the model and features.
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HelToupee - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
How's Linux driver support for video decoding coming along for AMD? Last I checked, it was supported in the closed drivers, but none of the players support it yet.Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) )
Finally - Wednesday, August 5, 2009 - link
[quote]Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) [/quote]If I was Google, I would ask you:
Did you mean "10 other people"?
sprockkets - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
Same here. Buying a Zotac 9300 ITX board with an Intel chip. VDPAU ftw.mczak - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
IMHO, the biggest drawback with G41 (and G43) isn't even mentioned - you lose two ram slots (some boards still have 4 but then you can equip all 4 only with single-sided ram, so useless). Hence this limits you for all practical purposes to 4GB (2x2GB) of ram. (The chipset could take 2 4GB modules but for that price you could probably buy 2 G45 boards with 8 2 GB modules...)Spivonious - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
Some other items...The G45 has the X4500HD, the G41 has the X4500. The G41 does not have hardware decoding for blu-ray movies.
flipmode - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
Is that some kind of double negative? Maybe "fewer and fewer" or something? No biggie, it just caught my eye immediately :smile:Sharles - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
The ICH7 chipset on my motherboard does have 1 PATA channel.Viditor - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
Agreed...Gary, you need to correct your table at the index. ICH7 has 1 PATA (2 device) connetion.iamezza - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
There are no graphs showing up on page 5R3MF - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
AMD are making a lot of fuss about 785G/Tigris supporting their next generation Stream computing initiative (read: OpenCL), would you be able to ask them if they intend to provide this support to the 780G chipset too?This is important because the 780G will form the core of 2nd gen ultra-mobile platform previously known as Congo.
I would be very grateful if you would ask this question.
Thanks