NVIDIA GF9300 (ECS GF9300TA) mainboard review - 1 - Introduction

Hey guys, today a new review partly from ECS and partly from NVIDIA. Today NVIDIA is introducing their more budget conscious mainboard chipsets. The GF9300 and GF9400 (MCP7a) based integrated graphics chipset motherboard products. In short, if you read our AMD 790GX reviews... it's exactly that idea yet with different nuances here and there.

The more interesting fact for a lot of you is that the GF9300 & GF9400 boards will run Intel based processors, which draws masses of people to products like these. See they are affordable, yet offer massive feature sets. In bold comparison to a 200-300 USD nForce mother board, they can actually match up to that baseline performance and dare I say it... offer even more value and are far better with power management. Hey, its nearly 2009, we need to think more green you guys.

Yes, a new and good trend for mainboard chipsets over the past 24 months was the development of becoming green. Face it, our PCs are massive wattage sucking devices. It's considered pretty normal these days that a PC utilizes 200 maybe 300 Watts. The effective use of applying power when and where needed makes PCs more green. And as a result we shall demonstrate that NVIDIA did some pretty exciting stuff on that topic. Even with a quad-core processor we'll manage to idle at desktop usage at only 100 Watts, and with 4 CPU cores maxed out... 160 Watts. Impressive numbers.

Next to that a new trend for mainboard chipsets, in the mainstream segment, is integrated graphics solutions. We'll see it more and more in the years to come, and mark my words... we feel that this trend is becoming normalized, and thus expect future chipsets to have a dedicated GPU inside that mainboard as standard.

Why is that so important you ask? For the simple fact that the integrated GPU consumes very little power. And the challenge to the industry is... utilize hardware when needed. So if you want to play a game... only activate the dedicated graphics card when needed and then switch back to the integrated solution. Confusing? Not really. These steps are needed. It's good for mother nature, it's good for your components, and it's good for your power bill. That's the kind of technology that the industry needs to evolve over the next few years.

So today we peek at a GF9300 mainboard, the model tested comes from the fine folks at ECS, and as always... they were quick enough to send us their "Black Edition" model, a product series that is doing so very well in the EU and USA thanks to it's nice design and additional features. Have a peek, let it sink in that you are looking at a product costing roughly 99-109 USD, and then hit the next page please.