The integrated chipset for Intel Pentium 4 processors, i845G and i845GL, looked really promising. For over half a year Intel engineers told the public about the advantages provided by the new graphics core used in these solutions, about its unprecedentedly high performance in 3D applications. Very often we could hear them say that the performance of the graphics core integrated into i845G/GL will be comparable to that of GeForce2 MX 400.

Today we received some info, which lets us estimate the performance of the new graphics core basing our judgment not on the Intel officials’ statements but on the independent benchmarks. The Chinese pcpop.com site posted a review of L4IBMG mainboard from ECS based on i845G chipset.

The results turned out far from positive for Intel. With default settings in 3DMark2001 SE i845G managed to get 1523 points while the external GeForce2 MX 400 graphics card working on the same mainboard in the AGP slot got 2851 points, which is almost twice as high. The same results could be observed in Quake3 as well. In Normal mode with the resolution set to 640x480, the integrated graphics core of i845G showed 89.7fps, while the external GeForce2 MX 400 – 220.7fps. As the resolution grew higher, the ratio between these results remained stable. In High Quality mode at 1024x768 i845G got 21.6fps and GeForce2 MX 400 – 69.8fps.

All in all, the integrated graphics core of i845G appeared considerably slower than GeForce2 MX 400. Of course, you can blame the raw drivers or the unofficial status of the mainboard sample tested, however, these poor results are very unlikely to improve by two-three times within a month left before the launch. This way, i845G (just like i815) will appear an Entry level integrated chipset for Value systems.