Today AMD has taken its covers off the 780G chipset designed specifically for the HTPC market.

 

It comes with DX10 onboard graphics processor powered by a core pulled from a Radeon HD 2400 graphics card. It is married with the new SB700 southbridge, it supports Phenom processors using its HyperTransport 3 link and it also has support for Hybrid Graphics using Radeon HD 3450 or 3470 to improve 3D performance.

 

Not only that, but AMD has also teamed the launch of the Radeon HD 3200 with its very latest CPU, the Athlon X2 4850e. It has the same 2.5GHz clock speed as the X2 4800 but has a TDP of just 45 watts and should end up costing just $89 USD. Add that to the fact that most 780G motherboards should cost around the $100 USD mark, and you have quite a respectively platform from the details we've seen so far.

 

It does indeed look like AMD have marketed it well on paper but how does it perform in real-world testing? Links below!

 

- Tech Report
- bit-tech
- AMDZone
- Hot Hardware
- PC Prospective
- Techware Labs
- Extreme Tech
- Tom's Hardware
- HEXUS
- LegitReviews
- Toms Hardware

 

The 780G is a new chipset from its integrated graphics processor through the north bridge and all the way down to the south bridge. Of those components, the IGP is perhaps the most exciting. Dubbed the Radeon HD 3200, the integrated graphics core is ripped directly from the RV610 graphics processor that powers the Radeon HD 2400 series-a chip that was released just eight months ago. That's incredibly quick trickle down from budget GPU to integrated graphics chipset, making this the first IGP we've had that's really in step with the current generation of discrete GPUs.

 

Because it's a member of the same graphics family as AMD's discrete GPUs, the Radeon HD 3200 is also eligible for Hybrid Graphics configurations. The chipset's GPU can be teamed with a single graphics card-in this case either a Radeon HD 3450 or 3470-to improve performance in 3D applications. Hybrid CrossFire only delivers performance gains when GPUs of relatively similar horsepower are combined, which is why the Radeon HD 3200 IGP will only work in conjunction with the HD 3400 series of discrete GPUs.

 

Within the integrated Radeon HD 3200 graphics processor lies a unified shader architecture that spreads 40 stream processors across two shader SIMDs. Also included are single texture and ROP units capable of handling four texels and pixels per clock, respectively. The vertex and texture caches are shared to save die area (they're separate with most other R600-based designs), but the Radeon HD 3200 is still very much a DirectX 10-class part. If you think of the new Radeon HD 3800 series as a V8, the 3200 is essentially a single piston-one that runs at an impressive 500MHz and has access to up to 512MB of system memory.