by Ilya Gavrichenkov
10/27/2005 | 01:41 PM
NVIDIA Corp. has long been known as a leading graphics processor manufacturer, but its involvement in the chipset market is somewhat shorter. The company began to make system logic at the end of 2001, introducing the nForce brand as a visiting card of all NVIDIA chipsets.
<%BANNER[article]%>Chipsets from the nForce and nForce2 families featured an advanced integrated graphics core – not a surprise, considering the experience of the company in the computer graphics area. The chipsets (referred to by the engineers as IGPs or Integrated Graphics Processors) with a built-in graphics core of the GeForce4 MX class became a sensation in 2002 as they pushed the performance bar of entry-level computers on a whole new level. Particularly, they delivered two or three times the speed of the i865G, the fastest integrated chipset until their release, in 3D applications. The high performance of the integrated graphics core contributed a lot to the popularity of NVIDIA’s nForce solutions.
However, NVIDIA did not continue to develop chipsets with an integrated graphics core. Why? Advanced integrated chipsets interfered with the sales of entry-level standalone graphics cards, so the company focused on discrete chipsets instead. Relying on the experience it had accumulated and on the good characteristics of its discrete chipsets, the company has strengthened its position as a system logic supplier. Right now NVIDIA controls over 50% of the market of chipsets for AMD’s platforms – a tremendous achievement for a term of three years and a half!
Having conquered the discrete chipset market, NVIDIA now returns with its integrated products and has recently announced a chipset with an integrated graphics core for Athlon 64 systems. The company had to correct its policy with respect to integrated graphics under the pressure of the changing market situation. Today, “digital home” PCs are becoming fashionable. For such computers multimedia capabilities and simple assembly are the main priorities rather than the performance of the graphics subsystem and NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are intended exactly for such applications. So, NVIDIA focused on functionality rather than performance when developing its new generation of integrated graphics, and the new IGPs do not threaten the market of low-end 3D graphics cards – they have too low performance for that. The graphics core built into the new chipsets meets today’s functionality requirements, however. It is compatible with DirectX 9, supports shaders, accelerates video decoding, and can of course work with Windows Vista, the upcoming operating system from Microsoft.
Characteristically, NVIDIA didn’t use the nForce brand to promote its new IGPs. From the nomenclature point of view the new chipsets are closer to graphics processors – they will be promoted under the GeForce 6100 brand. The number clearly indicates the affinity of the integrated graphics core to the GeForce 6 GPU family, but also lets you understand that the performance of the core is going to be lower than that of even the weakest standalone graphics card in the series, GeForce 6200 with TurboCache technology.
It has become a laudable tradition among all chipset developers to introduce their new products in series rather than singly. NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets also come in a variety of flavors that differ in the characteristics and price.
Since it was hard to fit a graphics core into a single semiconductor die along with all the system logic, NVIDIA returned to the classic, two-chip design in the new series. So, GeForce 6100 series chipsets consist of a North Bridge (or IGP – Integrated Graphics Processor) and a South Bridge (or MCP – Media and Communication Processor). An IGP and an MCP are linked with an 8-bit 800MHz HyperTransport bus.
The announced family includes two North Bridges, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100, and two South Bridges (nForce 430 and nForce 410). The manufacturer currently mentions three combinations of them as available solutions:
The formal differences between these combinations are not in fact critical for many applications, as you will see below. Before describing the new North and South Bridges from NVIDIA in more detail, we want to single out a few facts that need our attention.
First, NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are the first to be manufactured on 90nm tech process, at TSMC facilities. The advanced tech process ensures low cost of the chips as well as low heat dissipation. Second, the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 IGPs are the first chipsets with an integrated graphics core to support DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3.0. The nearest rivaling product, ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200, supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 2.0 only. And third, the new integrated chipset from NVIDIA is the company’s first product to support High-Definition Audio (Azalia). This fact is important for the intended application of the chipset in home multimedia PCs.
The GeForce 6150 and 6100 chips include a graphics core, a HyperTransport bus controller to communicate with the central processor and a PCI Express bus controller.
As for CPUs supported, the GeForce 6150 and 6100 support HyperTransport frequencies up to 1GHz. It means that either of these chipsets can become a foundation for both Socket 939 and Socket 754 systems and work with any processor from AMD’s Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron series.
The GeForce 6150 and 6100 are both equipped with a PCI Express x16 bus which can be used to connect an external graphics card to be used instead of the integrated graphics or as an additional graphics accelerator, working together with the integrated one. By default, these chipsets do not disable the integrated graphics core when an external graphics card is installed and thus can support four-monitor configurations. By the way, ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200, another popular integrated chipset for the Athlon 64 platform, only allows the integrated core and the external graphics card to work simultaneously if the graphics card’s GPUs belongs to the Radeon series. The GeForce 6100 series chipsets are free from such a limitation and support any graphics card.
Besides PCI Express x16, the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 have PCI Express x1 lanes for connecting external devices: the GeForce 6150 has two PCI Express x1 lanes and the simpler GeForce 6100 has one such lane.
The integrated graphics core of these chipsets supports Unified Memory Architecture. In other words, dedicated graphics memory is not installed on mainboards based on these IGPs – instead, the graphics core will use some of the system memory for its needs. The portion of system memory allocated to the graphics core may vary depending on the running application – NVIDIA uses this technique in its cheap graphics cards with the TurboCache technology.
Although the integrated graphics cores from NVIDIA have numeric markings close to 6200, their performance is far inferior to that of the GeForce 6200. This comes just from the architectural features of the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 – although compatible with DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0, these cores have only 2 pixel pipelines and 1 vertex shader. So, the GeForce 6150 and 6100 do not try to compete even with low-end GeForce 6 series cards in terms of performance. By the way, the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 architecture is very different: this graphics core has 4 pixel pipelines and processes vertices on the central processor.
The GeForce 6150 and 6100 modifications differ mainly in the frequency of the graphics core: 475MHz and 425MHz, respectively. This is 43% and 28% higher than the operational frequency of the graphics core in the ATI Radeon Xpress 200.
Frequency is not the only point of difference between the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100, though. The former and more advanced IGP supports TMDS/DVI interface and dual-monitor configurations – the GeForce 6100 doesn’t have that. Besides that, the GeForce 6150 features a hardware TV encoder which allows mainboards on this chipset to have an analog video-Out.
Another exclusive feature of the GeForce 6150 and 6100 is their support of NVIDIA’s PureVideo, a hardware video decoding and post-processing technology. Unlike the GeForce 6100, the GeForce 6150 supports HD video standards and high-quality scaling. It is also expected to support the H.264 format after an upcoming driver update.
To everything sum up and to compare the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200, we built the following table:
Although NVIDIA is already using separate and quite advanced South Bridges in its nForce 4 SLI (Intel Edition) and nForce4 SLI x16 chipsets, the company developed other MCPs for the integrated chipset. Why? Because NVIDIA’s older MCPs do not have all the features necessary for “digital home” computers. Particularly, the nForce 430 and nForce 410 South Bridges are the first NVIDIA MCPs to support the High-Definition Audio standard (Azalia).
Otherwise, the characteristics of the nForce 430 and nForce 410 are typical enough, resembling those of the nForce4 Ultra, for example. To be specific, the new South Bridges include a Serial ATA controller that supports the SATA II standard (300Mbps bandwidth) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The nForce 430 MCP supports four Serial ATA ports and RAID arrays of level 0, 1, 0+1 and 5, while the nForce 410 provides only two such ports and RAID array levels of 0 and 1. Besides Serial ATA, both South Bridges support two Parallel ATA ports.
The nForce 430 also has a built-in Gigabit Ethernet controller which features the hardware secure networking engine aka ActiveArmor (you can use NVIDIA’s exclusive firewall with this MCP). The junior model, nForce 410, is only equipped with a basic, 100Mbps network controller.
The nForce 430 and nForce 410 each provides eight USB 2.0 ports which should be enough for a multimedia PC. And finally, the PCI bus is supported by both these MCPs, too.
It’s time to set the main integrated chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform against each other and compare their specifications:
The new integrated chipsets from NVIDIA look somewhat better from the functionality point of view than their main rival, ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200. ATI’s chipset is on the losing side mainly because of its imperfect South Bridge which doesn’t offer many functions required today. Particularly, it doesn’t support SATA II and lacks a network controller. Moreover, ATI’s South Bridges have problems with the implementation of the Universal Serial Bus which for some reason works slower in them than in other chipsets.
So, NVIDIA’s chipsets win this comparison. However, mainboard manufacturers can improve the characteristics of the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 by replacing ATI’s standard South Bridge with an ULi M1575 chip that offers better functionality. It supports SATA II and NCQ, RAID arrays of level 0, 1, 0+1 and 5, and has no problems with USB 2.0. But even the ULi M1575 can’t match the functionality of the nForce 430 – it lacks a Gigabit Ethernet controller, not to mention an integrated hardware firewall.
NVIDIA’s integrated chipsets seem to allow building more functional platforms. We think this fact alone is enough for the GeForce 6100 series chipsets to acquire a large share of the market and to become popular in home computers built according to the fashionable “digital home” concept.
We took three mainboards to carry out a preliminary test of the capabilities of integrated chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform. One mainboard is based on the long-announced ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and the other two are built around the new chipsets from NVIDIA, GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100. Although based on different chipsets, the mainboards resemble each other in characteristics and price. They are all targeted at small home PCs and are designed in the MicroATX form-factor. These are generic features of many mainboards based on modern integrated chipsets, by the way.
So, let’s examine each mainboard closely.
Mainboards on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 are not widely available. Many shops don’t have them at all and you’ll see just a model or two in shops that do offer such products. Why? Because this chipset is a favorite of PC integrators, so a bulk of ATI’s chipsets are going directly to OEMs. But some mainboard manufacturers that work under OEM contracts still find opportunities to produce retail user oriented mainboards on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200, too. ASUS and ECS are among such manufacturers, for example. So, the Xpress 200-based mainboard we received for our tests, the ECS RS480-M model, is an analog of a mainboard used in personal computers from some major PC integrator, an ECS partner. This doesn’t prevent the ECS RS480-M from having certain traits typical of enthusiasts-targeted mainboards.
The first thing to be noted is that the manufacturers have ceased to regard Socket 939 as a top-end platform. As you can see, this socket can be now installed on mainboards which sell at about $80 in retail. This is not a big surprise, though, now that Semprons for Socket 939 are available (for details see our article called A Secret Disclosed: AMD Sempron 3000+ for Socket 939 Review ). The ECS RS480-M supports the full range of Socket 939 processors, including the Sempron. Starting from BIOS version 1.0g the mainboard can also work with dual-core CPUs.
The three-channel CPU power circuit on this mainboard has no special cooling of the MOSFETs, but they do not heat up much at work. The installed capacitors are made by OTS, a company that doesn’t have a good reputation among PC enthusiasts, frankly speaking.
The ECS RS480-M offers two DDR DIMM slots for your memory modules. They must both be filled for the memory controller to access the memory in the dual-channel mode. The mainboard’s BIOS does not give you much flexibility in fine-tuning the memory subsystem: memory frequency and CAS Latency are the only adjustable parameters here.
The mainboard has three PCI slots for expansion cards and a PCI Express x16 slot for an external (additional) graphics card. The chipset’s North Bridge is capped with a passive heatsink. The manufacturer thinks this will suffice to cool a 0.13-micron ATI RS480 chip, but we disagree. This IGP would overheat in our tests when the graphics load was high. So, you will need an additional chipset fan or a well-ventilated system case for the ECS RS480-M to work normally.
The small heatsink on the South Bridge conceals an ATI SB400 chip, one of the earliest South Bridges ATI developed for the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. Unlike the more up-to-date SB450 chip, the SB400 does not support High Definition Audio, and this is why the sound capabilities of the ECS RS480-M are implemented through an ordinary AC’97 codec (Realtek ALC655). Two Parallel ATA and four Serial ATA channels as well as eight USB 2.0 ports are implemented on the mainboard by means of the chipset’s South Bridge. ATI’s chipset doesn’t include a network controller, so the mainboard carries an external Fast Ethernet controller Realtek RTL8100C that supports data-transfer rates of 10/100Mbps.
The mainboard’s rear panel has a D-Sub connector for connecting a monitor, one parallel and one serial port, PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse, an RJ-45 network connector, four High-Speed USB ports and three audio inputs/outputs.
The mainboard is overall cleverly designed, considering its MacroATX form-factor. The ECS engineers managed to arrange properly a number of slots, connectors and chips on a very small PCB. You should not find it difficult to assemble the ECS RS480-M in your system case.
The overclocking opportunities provided by this mainboard (and very rare for products of that class, we should add) need to be mentioned. The mainboard’s BIOS allows you to adjust the clock-generator frequency from 200 to 250MHz, to reduce the CPU frequency multiplier, and to control the CPU VID parameter to lift the CPU voltage up to 1.55V. The DIMM voltage can also be increased up to 2.85V.
The mainboard also supports Cool’n’Quiet technology, an indispensable function for small home PCs that are expected to work as quietly as possible.
NVIDIA promised that mainboards on new GeForce 6100 series chipsets would begin to sell in October. The month is nearly over, but we have not yet seen the mainboards in shops. On the other hand, BIOSTAR, an NVIDIA partner in launching that product on the market, reports it has begun to ship not only GeForce 6100-based mainboards, but also small form-factor systems with this chipset.
Although it is yet impossible to buy an off-the-shelf mainboard on an nForce 6100 series chipset, many mainboard manufacturers offer samples of their upcoming nForce 6100-based products to test labs. Foxconn was kind to offer its samples to us.
The senior mainboard model from Foxconn on the integrated GeForce 6150 chipset has a model name of WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS. Note that Foxconn continues to use the WinFast brand for its Athlon 64 mainboards. The same brand is used by Leadtek for its graphics cards, so it is quite appropriately applied to a mainboard with an integrated graphics core.
The Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS resembles the above-described mainboard from ECS. Although these two mainboards are based on two completely different chipsets, the placement of the components on the PCBs is nearly identical. It means the reference design of GeForce 6100-based mainboards is close to the Radeon Xpress 200 reference design and the engineers from both companies paid much attention to the recommendations of the MicroATX standard.
Being equipped with a Socket 939, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS supports all available processors from AMD, including Sempron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX and dual-core Athlon 64 X2. The mainboard supports all Socket 939 CPU models since the very first versions of its BIOS.
The three-channel CPU voltage regulator uses original inductance coils in a casing and capacitors from OST and Nippon Chemi-Con. OST’s capacitors are often criticized, while Nippon’s are high-quality electronic parts. Foxconn’s engineers managed to put as many as four DDR DIMM slots on this MicroATX mainboard. The slots are color-coded, the same color marking slots in which you should put identical memory modules. By the way, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS offers you more control over the memory subsystem than the above-described ECS RS480-M. Besides setting up the memory frequency and the Tcl timing, you can change Tras, Trcd, and Trp. The BIOS Setup lacks the Command Rate option, although there are four memory slots on board.
The Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS is equipped with three PCI slots and one PCI Express x16 slot for an external graphics card which can work either with or instead of the integrated graphics core.
A massive aluminum heatsink is mounted on the GeForce 6150 North Bridge on this mainboard. This should be enough to cool the 90nm chip. The role of the South Bridge on the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS is played by an nForce 430 chip. Thus, the mainboard uses the most advanced North + South Bridge combination from NVIDIA. The nForce 430 MCP is also covered with an aluminum heatsink.
Using the South Bridge’s capabilities, the mainboard offers you two Parallel ATA and four Serial ATA II ports, eight USB 2.0 ports as well as sound and network. The integrated network controller is implemented according to the chipset specification. It is coupled with a PHY chip Marvell 88E1111, supports data-transfer speeds up to 1Gbps and features the hardware ActiveArmor technology which allows NVIDIA’s Firewall 2.0 to work without putting any big load on the central processor.
The implementation of the audio section is rather questionable, however. Although the nForce 430 MCP supports High Definition Audio, the Foxconn engineers put a Realtek ALC850, i.e. an ordinary AC’97 codec, on board. This codec can work with eight-channel speaker systems, but there’s no talk about HD quality here. So, Foxconn killed one of the key advantages of the new NVIDIA chipset for some unknown reason.
NVIDIA’s South Bridges do not support the FireWire interface, so an external PCI controller from Texas Instruments is installed on the mainboard for that purpose.
The mainboard’s rear panel carries a D-Sub connector for an external monitor, one parallel and one serial port, PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse, one RJ-45 network connector, four High-Speed USB ports, one FireWire port and six audio jacks.
The BIOS Setup of the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS offers some CPU overclocking options. You can increase the clock-generator frequency up to 300MHz and the CPU voltage up to 140 millivolts above the default value. The memory voltage can be increased up to 2.85V. Frankly speaking, these overclocking options did not work on our sample of the mainboard – they are to be enabled in future BIOS updates. But Cool’n’Quiet technology already works normally on the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS.
Foxconn supplies an exclusive software bundle with its mainboard. It includes a system monitoring tool and utilities to change the boot-up image and to update the BIOS. Don’t also forget about exclusive utilities from NVIDIA. So far, only NVIDIA Firewall 2.0 can work with the GeForce 6150, but the rest of the suite is going to support the new chipset in near future, too.
Despite its big potential, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS left us somewhat unsatisfied. It seems an unfinished product as yet, but we hope all the problems will be corrected in next BIOS updates. In its current state the mainboard doesn’t even allows reflashing the BIOS chip – the computer hangs up during the process irrespective of the tool you are trying to update the BIOS with.
Besides the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS, Foxconn offered us another mainboard, the WinFast 6100K8MA-RS model. While the former mainboard is a top-end product, the WinFast 6100K8MA-RS is, on the contrary, a cheapest solution. In other words, it is based on the combination of a GeForce 6100 IGP and an nForce 410 MCP.
The different IGPs and MCPs described in this review are pin-compatible, so the Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS is based on the same PCB as the above-described WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS. It means many functional units of these two products are designed in exactly the same way. So, we won’t describe the 6100K8MA-RS as such, but rather focus on where it differs from its more expensive analog.
So, the main features of the Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS mainboard and its differences from the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS are all due to the use of a GeForce 6100 North Bridge in conjunction with an nForce 410 South Bridge.
It’s not so easy to see, however, that the massive aluminum heatsink on this mainboard covers a GeForce 6100, not a 6150. The difference can only be discovered by the frequency of the graphics core. As for the South Bridge (nForce 410), it gives itself away immediately, unlike the North one.
First of all you note the fact that only two Serial ATA ports are soldered to the Foxconn WinFast 6100K8MA-RS since the nForce 410 MCP doesn’t support more. The simpler mainboard model also carries a different network PHY controller – a 10/100Mbps Realtek RTL8201BL instead of a Gigabit Ethernet chip. The audio section is different, too. The mainboard with the nForce 6100 IGP is equipped with a six-channel AC’97 Realtek ALC655 codec rather than an eight-channel one.
Trying to reduce the cost of the product, the Foxconn engineers stripped the WinFast 6100K8MA-RS of a FireWire controller, too. There’s empty space on the PCB where it should have been.
The mainboard’s rear panel looks desolate, too. There is no FireWire port and half the audio connectors that you saw on the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS.
Otherwise, the two mainboards from Foxconn, on GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets, are absolutely identical. By the way, these two models not only share the same PCB but also the same BIOS. Thus, the features and problems of the WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS apply to the WinFast 6100K8MA-RS in the same measure.
The main goal of this preliminary test session was to determine the level of performance of the integrated GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets. In the theoretical part of the review we have repeatedly stressed the fact that it does not make any sense to compare these chipsets with today’s graphics cards because the chipsets have obviously worse characteristics from the architectural point of view. The new integrated chipsets from NVIDIA are not even supposed to compete with standalone graphics cards. They are targeted at a different sector of the market. So, it is only sensible to compare the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 with products of their own category, i.e. with integrated chipsets with DirectX 9 support.
There is as yet only one more chipset with an integrated graphics core whose capabilities make it suitable for “digital home” computers. We mean ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 and this chipset will be compared with NVIDIA’s new products below.
Besides testing the integrated chipsets using their own graphics core, we also carried out some tests with an external graphics card. So we will give you information on how efficient the graphics cores built into the chipsets are and also how high the “overall” performance of the chipsets is. This overall performance is compared with that of a system with a mainboard on the discrete NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset.
So, here’s a full list of hardware parts employed in the tests:
We performed all tests in Windows XP SP2.
We first wanted to check the performance of the integrated chipsets in ordinary desktop applications. Generally speaking, a UMA graphics core may negatively affect the performance of the entire system since it shares the same memory with the CPU and thus decreases the memory bandwidth available to the central processor.
The results of SYSMark 2004 SE clearly show that the UMA technology is better implemented in NVIDIA’s new chipsets than in ATI’s one: the system with the NVIDIA GeForce 6100 is about 5-7% faster than the system with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200.
The difference between the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 systems is negligible. The frequency of the integrated graphics core seems to have a very little effect on the speed of 2D applications.
NVIDIA’s integrated chipsets are faster than ATI’s even in simple computational tasks. We should not put all the blame on the chipset maker, though. It is possible that the BIOS of the ECS RS480-M mainboard (on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset) is not properly optimized.
The synthetic PCMark05 test assigns a higher score to the NVIDIA chipsets than to the ATI one. It is partially due to the fact that this benchmark includes tests of the graphics core in 2D mode and a pixel shader performance test.
First we wanted to get the performance score from the specialized synthetic graphics subsystem benchmark from the PCMark05 suite.
These numbers reflect the ratings of the graphics cores based on their performance in 2D mode, at video playback, and at executing pixel and vertex shaders. ATI’s integrated graphics yields a very low result against the achievements of the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100. Take a look at the next table with subtest numbers to see where this difference comes from:
As you see, the new GeForce 6100 series chipsets surpass the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 in nearly every parameter, especially in the pixel and vertex shader performance subtests. The ATI chipset is the worst in the Transparent Windows and the graphics memory tests, too. The only success of ATI here is the relatively high video playback speed.
And here are the results of some other benchmarks from Futuremark:
NVIDIA’s integrated chipsets are the best in all the three 3DMark versions. The difference in the performance of the graphics cores of the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 is easy to observe and varies from 3% to 7%.
What about real gaming?
The integrated chipsets from NVIDIA perform well enough here, for their class. The GeForce 6150 is almost as fast as the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 even in Half-Life 2 which is evidently optimized for ATI’s graphics processors. So, the only game where ATI’s chipset gains a pure victory is Far Cry .
It should also be noted that the effective difference in performance between the GeForce 6150 and 6100 is less than 8%, although their graphics core frequencies differ by 12%.
Playing video in various formats at an acceptable speed is important for integrated chipsets targeted at home computers. That’s why all modern integrated chipsets have hardware technologies for decoding video content and improving its quality.
To check the performance of the tested graphics cores at reproducing various video formats we used Windows Media Player 10 with a patch that enables DirectX video acceleration for WMV HD content. The following videos were used:
NVIDIA’s PureVideo engine shows itself in the tests. The CPU load remains very low on the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100-based mainboards during video playback, just like it is on the mainboard with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200. NVIDIA’s products are only better than ATI’s in just a single case, though – when reproducing HD video in WMV format.
Before making our final remarks about the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets we want to test them with an external graphics card, too. We don’t assume that many people will use such a configuration, but these tests reveal the overall efficiency of the new chipsets.
The results of a popular mainboard on the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset are given in the diagrams for reference.
As you see, the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100, when they work with an external graphics card, are comparable with discrete Athlon 64 chipsets in performance.
The popular synthetic benchmarks say the same thing. By the way, these benchmarks also show that the mainboard on the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset is a little below the general level. This is probably because the BIOS of the ECS RS480-M is not optimized properly.
The PCI Express x16 interface works without problems on the reviewed mainboards.
The results we got in today’s computer games agree with what we’ve seen above. The GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 can be successfully used with an external graphics card. The graphical performance of the system will be no worse than that of Athlon 64 mainboards on other chipsets.
The return of NVIDIA to the market of integrated chipsets seems to be as successful as the company’s first steps in that field. NVIDIA’s new GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 chipsets have a good chance to win the market, but in a slightly different manner than before.
If you thought that NVIDIA would offer a fast but inexpensive solution for economical gamers, you may feel truly disappointed. The graphics core of NVIDIA’s new chipsets, although supports DirectX 9 and Shader Model 3.0, falls far from the performance of even the cheapest standalone graphics cards of today. In fact, only previous-generation games run at an acceptable speed on the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100. But well, the chipset developer didn’t even try to meet the needs of gamers. The positioning of the new products is completely different. NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are intended for home multimedia PCs built according to the digital home concept. Viewed from this perspective, the GeForce 6150 and the GeForce 6100 seem much more appealing. Compatible with the upcoming operating systems and feature-rich, NVIDIA’s chipsets will permit to build inexpensive, small and functional computers. They provide all modern interfaces, have a high-performance network controller with a hardware firewall, reproduce HD content and support High Definition Audio. What else could you wish to have in a multimedia PC? And the price of a typical MicroATX mainboard based on a GeForce 6150 or GeForce 6100 will be as low as $80.
It should be noted that NVIDIA’s new integrated chipsets are undoubtedly preferable to ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 not only because the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100 are slightly faster in a majority of applications, but also because they offer a much wider functionality. Functionality is a strong argument in the eyes of PC integrators. So, we only have to wait for stable and reliable mainboards to appear and it may take some time if some technical problems persist.