We compared three Intel motherboards using a Core 2 Duo E8500 that runs at 3.16GHz at a cost of £150, while the two AMD chipsets were run on an Athlon X2 7750 that, at £65, is considerably cheaper. Both processors are dual core and, despite the name, the Athlon X2 7750 is actually a two-core Phenom so the memory support runs to 1066MHz DDR 2. The Intel motherboards also support DDR 2 rather than DDR 3.
The Athlon X2 7750 has a clock speed of 2.7GHz so we raised the speed to 2.8GHz on standard voltages to give it slightly more grunt without increasing the power draw or heat output.
3DMark06 Results
Longer bars are better
Power Draw Results
Power draw in Watts (W)
COMMENTS
SiS and other stuff...
If you're looking for a motherboard that uses an SiS chipset, the Intel D201GLY2/2A (with embedded 1.3GHz Celeron CPU) would be one choice. I got one and was really pretty impressed with what it could do, especially considering the limited processing power it has.
Integrated graphics are OK in my book, even if they don't perform all that well. It bothers me that the graphics options from nVidia and ATI either have huge heatsinks or cook themselves into an early grave. I've never lost an integrated graphics chipset...compared to a few ATI and nVidia boards that just got too hot.
Resolutions
I don't really care for speed, but I need to know which maximum resolution is supported? Can I, for example connect 2 30" LCDs onto an Intel board with 2 DVI connectors? Do know that I have to know which resolutions the chipset supports.
Please help this idiot (me)
Um... My brain is a little slow today... which these of motherboards would be best for building a cheapish, cool and QUIET media centre PC? Or would a Playstation 3 (at 250 GBP) be better for this task?
Cometh the AMD fanboyz....
Is it me or are the only whiners here the AMD fanboyz?
@! Desktop integrated graphics shoot-out
But of course, ATI & nVidia long for the day when they can give away the farm cheap instead of having quad display gamers buy a video card. Perish the thought of paying more for more features.
About the CPU, these boards really should've been fitted with the slowest CPUs that weren't completely castrated with less than 1MB L2 cache, otherwise it's a bit silly talking about power consumption and someone cheaping out on the video tends to do the same on the processor. Regardless, at least we had more than a small amount of assurance the processor (nevermind the memory bus??) itself wasn't a bottleneck for the video benchmarks.
