AMD's 785G Chipset - Revolutionary or Evolutionary?
by Gary Key on August 4, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Heavy Multitasking: Our typical workday at home.
The vast majority of our benchmarks are single task events that utilize anywhere from 23MB up to 1.4GB of memory space during the course of the benchmark. Obviously, this is not enough to fully stress test our 4GB memory configuration. We devised a benchmark that would simulate a typical home situation and consume as much memory without crashing the machine.
We start by opening two instances of Internet Explorer 8.0 each with six tabs opened to flash intensive websites followed by Adobe Reader 9.1 with a rather large PDF document open, and a nice game of video poker banished to the taskbar. We then open Bibble 5 with our standard test setup, and CyberLink Espresso with the YouTube HD conversion file, Microsoft Excel and Word 2007 with large documents, Hulu TV, and finally Photoshop CS4 with our test image.
We wait two minutes for all activities to cease and then start playing Legend of the Seeker via Hulu HD TV at 1280x720, start the photo conversion in Bibble, and then the HD transcode in Espresso. Our maximum memory usage during the benchmark is 3.37GB with 100% CPU utilization across the two threads.
Thanks to the hardware decoding offload in Espresso, our AMD 785G DDR3 platform finishes our two tasks 40 seconds before the Intel G41 configuration or for our percentage trackers, AMD is over 9% quicker. Looking at the individual scores, the Intel system walks away in the Bibble test but falls short in the Espresso application.
We did experience a few stutters with the Intel G41 system during heavy action sequences in our HD video feed that were not present on the 785G even though our Espresso test sequence was off loaded to the GPU. Throughout all of our testing, it was this one test that impressed us the most with the 785G platform, especially its video playback capabilities.
While the Intel platform was 9% slower, it also consumed almost 8% less energy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
43 Comments
View All Comments
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