Test System

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16GHz (9.5x333MHz)

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

Hard Disk: 500GB Western Digital SE16 (Supplied by Western Digital)

Graphics Card: GIGABYTE 9800GX2 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

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

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista SP1

Drivers: Intel INF 9.0.0.1008, Forceware 175.16

Today we will be pushing the P45 based GIGABYTE EP45-DQ6 against the Foxconn Concerto to see how much difference there is between the two chipsets. Not only will we be testing out the chipset, but we'll also focus our attention on the onboard IGP, the X4100 of the G45 to see how well it manages to keep up compared to a discrete solution in real world applications. We aren't expecting it to keep up when playing Crysis, however, we will endeavour to test it nonetheless.

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.

First off, it's into memory performance. G45 and P45 with discrete GPUs perform identically since Intel used the same memory controllers on the G45 and P45. When we enabled onboard graphics we see a slight drop in memory bandwidth. However, Intel's new DVMT management limits the system down to 8MB of memory when the GPU is in 2D mode, allowing more system memory to be used by the CPU and other applications.