ASUS M3N78 PRO GeForce 8300 Motherboard Review

Powered by NVIDIA’s GeForce 8300, one of the company’s latest IGP-based chipsets, the ASUS M3N78 PRO features Hybrid SLI technology with ‘GeForce Boost’ for increased graphics performance, and ‘HybridPower’ for intelligent power saving:

A few months ago, NVIDIA announced that any future chipset from the company would come with an integrated graphic chip built-in. The rationale behind NVIDIA’s decision is that while we need a super powerful graphics card in games, the computer system is actually not going to need all that graphical power while it is running desktop applications. By incorporating mGPU and combining it with NVIDIA’s “Hybrid power”, the computer is able to reduce the power usage (and energy bill) by switching off the discrete graphics card and using only the integrated graphics for low-demand applications. When the demand for graphic power increases, the dedicated graphic card will then kick in.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset has shown some potential to become one of the best integrated GPUs for HTPC use. Despite its aim towards budget gamers and/or HTPC users, it is not skimping on the features. The inclusion of PCI express 2.0, DirectX 10 capable graphic ability, offload HD encoding to GPU, Hybrid SLI, 12 USB ports, and RAID, provide excellent additions to the chipset… Looking at the result, it would be safe to say that the the GeForce 8300 would be a good alternative to the AMD 780G.

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