Introduction

While we've had a lot of Intel based motherboards here at TweakTown over the last couple of years, it's been a one horse show in terms of the power market. Intel has had its finger on the pulse of the end users, and its Core 2 architecture really has helped them get ahead. With the delays and troubles AMD has experienced trying to get its Phenom to market, Big Blue has managed to gain quite a market share back from the gamers that AMD stole from them during the Athlon 64 Vs. Pentium IV days.

While things aren't as Rosie for AMD now, Phenom is starting to finally make its way into the market. And with prices of a Phenom X4 9850, their top of the line CPU so far hitting an extremely affordable $270-280 AUD, quad-core processing is not out of the reach of every day users.

Though AMD themselves have an impressive chipset line-up for the Phenom, we can't forget one of the biggest supporters of AMD. In fact, they have helped AMD out something incredible. Starting back when the Athlon was a Socket A chip, nForce chipsets have been around to help boost the performance. NVIDIA are back again with GeForce based chipsets sporting IGP graphics.

Today we have our first board from ZOTAC, one of the many companies we met at Computex. They have sent us their GeForce 8300 based Micro-ATX offering aimed at the digital home segment. How well does it perform? Read on to find out.