Test System

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-1186 Geil (Supplied by Geil)

Hard Disk: 500GB Seagate 7200.9 (Supplied by Seagate Australia)

Graphics Card: MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Supplied by MSI)

Cooling: GIGABYTE 3D Galaxy II (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Drivers: NVIDIA Beta GeForce Driver

Our test systems today consist of the AMD 690G chipset which has really been a great chipset for the budget desktop sector thanks to its onboard graphics, and also of course the new GeForce 8200 chipset. Unfortunately we didn't have any time to test Hybrid SLI or overclocking since we only received the board less than 24 hours before our deadline, so we had to push through the standard tests.

We did however perform both discrete graphics and onboard graphics tests comparing the two platforms.

EVEREST Ultimate Edition

Version and / or Patch Used: 2006

Developer Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Product Homepage: http://www.lavalys.com

Buy It Here

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.

In our first test we see that when using the discrete graphics systems there are no differences due to the onboard memory controller being used and none of the memory bandwidth allocated to the graphics cards. When we go to integrated graphics the NVIDIA system managed to get ahead which could be due to some special memory management that is used keep the memory bandwidth to the CPU when the GPU is idle.