Introduction

As of the last year and a half it's all been Intel's time to shine. Intel has really put a lot in on Core 2 architecture, and even its updated cores like Penryn haven't disappointed, not to mention we've also seen excellent chipsets coming left and right for it; but what about the jolly green giant AMD? It's easy to have forgotten what they've been up to recently.

While Intel does have the most powerful CPUs available on the market, we can't forget the main reason behind the Intel Core architecture, that being K8 architecture that sent Intel into a tail spin and threw them off the top of the hill. By no means is AMD dead though; Athlon 64 X2s still provide good bang for the dollar value, and while Phenom hasn't shown up to be crash hot just yet, its price and performance seem to be right in the mainstream contention.

To that end we have to wonder where are the chipsets for this platform? - Phenom comes with the new Hyper Transport 3.0 protocol along with support for higher memory frequencies on the DDR2 platform, but so far only AMD's own 790FX Series chipsets have made their way into the market; that is till now!

Since AMD acquired ATI to do its chipset bidding, we haven't seen much from NVIDIA for the Athlon 64 and Phenom platforms. The first new generation chipset designed by NVIDIA to support the Phenom and Athlon 64 processors has arrived; codenamed the MCP78, it has officially been given the name "GeForce 8200".

Our first board is from Palit who have sent us over their first production motherboard based on the MCP78 for previewing. How will the new chipset fair compared to the 690G? Let's have a closer look.