NVIDIA 780a: Integrated Graphics and SLI in One
by Gary Key on May 6, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
NVIDIA's chipsets have almost always been pretty decent (if not excellent with the nForce4 for AMD), their only issues were usually price and a lack of any compelling features to justify the added cost. SLI was always the biggest selling point of NVIDIA's platforms but with the nForce 780a (and its new lineup of chipsets in general), NVIDIA is attempting to bring more value to the table.
Honestly the biggest attraction to the nForce 780a SLI platform is its support for HybridPower, which will finally allow gamers to build machines that are both high performance and are efficient on power usage. Thankfully you aren't limited to the 780a for HybridPower support as these motherboards won't come cheap. Our ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe board will carry an introductory price of $249, something we are not used to seeing in the current AMD market sector.
Whether or not this price tag is worth the premium over the nForce 750a SLI boards is up for debate. It's not really in our opinion as we do not believe the current AMD processor series is capable of the required computational power needed to support 3-way SLI or Quad SLI configurations. This is not a knock against NVIDIA as AMD has the same problem with Quad CrossFire; it just reflects the current state of the processor offerings from AMD.
HybridPower is clearly in its infancy, the lack of dual-link DVI support from the mGPU means that owners of 30" displays can't enjoy the benefits until the next generation of NVIDIA chipsets come out. We would like to see eventual automated switching between HybridPower modes, not to mention a reduction in switch time for multi-GPU setups, but we'll take what we can get as a starting point. The list of GPUs that support HybridPower will hopefully continue to grow as NVIDIA would be doing its customer base a disservice by reserving the feature for only its highest end graphics cards.
Then there's the plain fact that what we're looking at here is an expensive Socket-AM2+ chipset, and while AMD can be competitive at lower price points, at the very high end of the market there's simply no reason to go with anything non-Intel right now. With Intel's G45 chipset due out later this summer, we would much rather see an Intel solution from NVIDIA shipped quickly as the combination of a mGPU with H.264 decode acceleration and HybridPower could be enough to actually make NVIDIA's platforms competitive in the Intel space.
Looking to the future, we wonder what will happen to NVIDIA's chipset business. Giving every chipset integrated graphics is a good move, but is it possible that it is too little, too late? Nehalem will begin shipping this year and next year we should start to see models with integrated graphics, leaving NVIDIA with SLI as the only thing it has to bring to the table once again. Losing on the integrated graphics performance front to AMD is also troublesome. Surpassing Intel's IGP performance is nothing to crow about for a GPU manufacturer; it's the competing GPU manufacturers that you have to beat, and here NVIDIA falls short. We want to see NVIDIA raising the bar for mGPU performance relative to AMD, not lowering it.
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homerdog - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
Don't get me wrong, HybridPower is a cool feature that I will consider when I'm making my next motherboard/GPU purchase.However, the fact remains that the HD3K cards have a significantly larger delta between their idle and load power consumption figures than the current crop of Nvidia cards. If ATI continues to build on this trend they may not even need a complex mGPU/dGPU hybrid solution to get idle consumption down to near IGP levels, although they're probably working on one anyway.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
Now we just need Hybrid Power in laptops - where it should have been first, IMO! At the very least, HybridPower should have shipped with support for 8800GT/GTS 512 and 9600 cards rather than just 9800 GTX/GX2.Also, my two cents on GeForce Boost: hooray for an extra 20% over 20FPS. That sounds fine, until you look at the bigger picture. A GeForce 8400 GS or 8500 GT is terribly slow relative to most discrete GPUs. Sure, they cost $40 to $70 depending on model and features. An extra 20% performance (or even 50%) would be fine. However, a $75 8600GT is already about twice as fast and a 9600GT (with rebates available for $110-$120) isn't even on the same continent.
If you have an IGP motherboard and you think it's too slow for games, I seriously doubt you're going to want to spend $50 to roughly double the performance. As any mathematician can tell you, multiplying any real number by zero is still zero. It may not be that bad, but I'd say 9600GT with Hybrid Power support is what people should shoot for. I figure that will arrive some time in the near future. Then just wait for it to show up on Intel platforms.
FITCamaro - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
While I agree with you, I think this is a great idea. An onboard GPU is always going to use less power than a discrete one. The main issue I'm concerned with is, does the system get back the memory used by the onboard GPU when the discrete GPU is in use? Granted it's only going to use 64-128MB of RAM likely, maybe 256. But still, those are resources that aren't able to be used by games.Of course it doesn't really matter for most since it only supports the 9800GTX and 9800GX2 and, in my opinion, you'd have to be stupid to go with the 9800GTX when the 8800GTS 512MB offers nearly identical performance. Heck even the 8800GT 512MB is only about 5 FPS different.
They need to offer the hybrid power support across the entire 8x00 series.
BansheeX - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
Who cares about the Phenom? Where is the Intel variant, aka 730i? Another three month delay for that one? Sigh.FITCamaro - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
People who want a Phenom.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, May 7, 2008 - link
Those mythical people exist?KnightProdigy - Thursday, May 8, 2008 - link
There are a lot of AMD fans. AMD still has a lot of loyal followers, maybe you forget that AMD had the speed crown for many more years than Intel. I have been an NV fan since it was STB in the early 90s, I, for one, like the fact that they are offering similar solutions, even though they lag a little.Gary Key - Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - link
We expect to see the Intel mGPU variants this summer, just in time to compete with the G45.