NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

With all of the recent hoopla surrounding Intel and NVIDIA as of late, today's announcement may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you. To say that there has been some tension between Intel and NVIDIA lately would certainly be putting it mildly. But the fact of the matter is, for now at least, the two companies share a somewhat symbiotic relationship. The products we'll be showing you here are proof of this fact.

What we have on tap for you today is a new NVIDIA chipset with an mGPU (or IGP) designed for the Intel Socket 775 platform, the GeForce 9300. We should note, however, that NVIDIA is also announcing the GeForce 9400 today as well, the same chipset that powers Apple's new MacBook line of products, but the two are nearly identical save for a few minor spec variations. Whether you're a small form-factor type, Home Theater PC buff or one of the newly enamored by Apple's new line of sleek notebooks, read on to find out about these enabling technologies that NVIDIA has launched today in platform chipsets with integrated graphics engines.

GeForce 9300 Block Diagram

The high-level block diagram above does a good job of clearly illustrating the GeForce 9300's (and 9400's) main features. As you can see, the GeForce 9300 supports virtually all flavors of Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron processors with front side bus speeds up to 1333MHz. The chipset is comprised of a single chip and the mGPU features 16 shader cores, with support for DX10 and many of NVIDIA's proprietary technologies, like CUDA, Hybrid SLI, PhysX and PureVideo HD. The GeForce 9300 mGPU has output support for virtually all of the major port types (DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, etc.) with support for HD audio as well.

The chipset can support DDR2 or DDR3 memory technologies, although the two motherboards we'll be showing you in this article required DDR2. It also sports 12 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, six SATA 3.0Gb/s ports (with RAID), 20 PCI express 2.0 lanes, and support for 5 PCI slots.
 

CPU	Core 2 Family Pentium D Pentium 4 Celeron D Celeron	Core 2 Family Pentium D Pentium 4 Celeron D Celeron
FSB	1333 Mhz	1333 Mhz
Memory Interface	Dual-channel DDR2-800 / DDR3-1333	Dual-channel DDR2-800 / DDR3-1333
DirectX 10 Support	Yes	Yes
Graphics Cores	16	16
Core/Shader Clocks	580/1400 MHz	450/1200 MHz
Texture Fill Rate	3.6 Billion/second	3.6 Billion/second
Max. Anti-Aliasing (AA) Sample Rate	16×	16×
RAMDACs	400 MHz	400 MHz
Max. HDR Precision	128-bit	128-bit
Max. Analog Resolution	2048 × 1536	2048 × 1536
Max Digital Resolution	2560 × 1600	2560 × 1600
GeForce Boost Technology	Yes	Yes
HybridPower Technology	Only available in select designs	Only available in select designs
NVIDIA PureVideo HD	Yes With full HD decode (1080i/p)	Yes With full HD decode (1080i/p)
Display options	RGB, dual-link DVI, HDMI, DP	RGB, dual-link DVI, HDMI, DP
PCI-Express 2.0	20 lanes 1 × 16 4 × 1	20 lanes 1 × 16 4 × 1
SATA drives	6	6
SATA speed	3 Gbps	3 Gbps
RAID	0, 1, 0+1, 5	0, 1, 0+1, 5
NVIDIA MediaShield Storage technology	Yes	Yes
Networking	10/100/1000	10/100/1000
USB ports	12 / 2C	12 / 2C
PCI Slots	5	5
Audio	HDA (Azalia)	HDA (Azalia)
HD Audio Support	7.1 LPCM	7.1 LPCM

In terms of their specifications, the new GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400 are nearly identical. As you can see in the spec list above, the only differences between the two are that the GeForce 9400 has a higher clocked GPU and shader cores. These attribute would obviously give the GeForce 9400 an edge in the 3D performance department, but as you'll see a little later, even the GeForce 9300 is far more powerful than any of Intel's current IGPs.