NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

For the purpose of this article we have obtained a couple of GeForce 9300-based motherboards from Asus and Zotac. Both of the boards, in full retail trim, are pictured below...

    

    

   
Zotac GeForce 9300

The Zotac GeForce 9300 is a micro-ATX motherboard, built upon a black PCB with color coded connections and headers. As you'd expect from a motherboard of this class, the Zotac GeForce 9300 ships with a basic accessory bundle, which includes a couple of SATA, IDA, and floppy cables, a case bracket with additional Firewire ports, an I/O shield, a user's manual and driver CD.

Right smack in the middle of the motherboard, you can see a small, active cooler mounted atop of the GeForce 9300 chipset. The Zotac GeForce 9300 motherboard features a single PCI Express x1 slot, a single PCI Express x16 slot, and two standard PCI slots.  In addition to all of the features inherent to the chipset (mentioned on the previous page), the Zotac board also features a handy POST code error reporter, Firewire support through the use of VIA controller, and IDE and floppy support through the use of a JMicron controller.  Generally, the layout of the motherboard is good, considering the tight quarters associated with the micro-ATX form factor, and users shouldn't have any problem fitting aftermarket coolers on the board.

The I/O port cluster on the Zotac GeForce 9300 consists of PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, composite, HDMI, DVI, and VGA outputs, four USB ports, a, RJ45 LAN jack, and six assorted audio jacks.

    

    

    
Asus P5N7A-VM

The Asus P5N7A-VM has much in common with the Zotac GeForce 9300 board above.  They are both built upon dark colored PCBs, they both conform to the micro-ATX form factor, and they both have the same compliment of expansion slots.  Bundled with the Asus P5N7A-VM, we found the expected assortment of accessories, including SATA and IDE cables, a pack of Asus' Q-Connectors, an I/O shield, and of course a user's manual and driver CD.

The layout of the P5N7A-VM is very similar to the Zotac board, except for the placement of its SATA, IDE and ATX connectors.  The positioning of the boards' DIMM slots, expansion headers, supplemental power connection, and various other components are all similar.  The I/O port cluster on the P5N7A-VM though has much more going in.  In the P5N7A-VM's port cluster you'll find a single PS/2 port, six USB ports, analog and digital audio outputs, DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI, and VGA display outputs, and Ethernet port, and an eSATA connector.