NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs - Page 4
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 09:00 AM EDT

Our Test Systems and SANDRA

Page 4: Our Test Systems and SANDRA

How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
Core 2 Quad Q9650
(3.0GHz - Dual-Core)

Zotac GF 9300 / Asus P5N7A-VM
(NVIDIA GeForce 9300 Chipset)

2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500
CL 5-5-5-15 - DDR2-1066

GeForce 9300 IGP
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

WD740 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA

Windows Vista Ultimate
DirectX Redist (June 2008)

System 2:
Core 2 Quad Q9650
(3.0GHz - Dual-Core)

Intel G45PID
(G45 Express)

2x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800
CL 7-7-7-20 - DDR3-1333

Intel IGP
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

WD740 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA

Windows Vista Ultimate
DirectX Redist (June 2008)

System 3:
AMD Phenom X4 9850
(2.5GHz)

Asus M3N-HT Deluxe / Gigabyte MA790GP
(nForce 780a SLI / 790GX)

2x1GB Corsair PC2-8500
CL 5-5-5-15 - DDR2-1066

GeForce 780a IGP
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

WD740 "Raptor" HD
10,000 RPM SATA

Windows Vista Ultimate
DirectX Redist (June 2008)

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA XII

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with a Core 2 Quad Q9650 processor installed in the Asus P5N7A-VM motherboard (CPU Arithmetic, Memory Latency, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running a clock speed of 3GHz, with 2GB of DDR2 RAM installed.

Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3GHz CPU Arithmetic GeForce 9300	Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3GHz Memory Bandwidth GeForce 9300	Core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3GHz Memory Latency GeForce 9300

The GeForce 9300's performance in the three SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks we ran fell right in line with expectations. The CPU Arithmetic benchmark showed our GeForce 9300-based test system, right on par with the QX9650 based reference system. The memory bandwidth benchmark showed significantly lower peak bandwidth available on the GF9300, but that is to be expected on a system equipped with an IGP that shares main memory. And the latency benchmark reported a speed factor of 119.2, which was actually fairly strong versus the reference systems.