GIGABYTE GA-MA-78GM-S2H

Josh Collins is coming around to AMD's latest breed of integrated motherboards.

It wasn’t too long ago that we saw the launch of the 7-series flagship 790FX chipset from AMD break into the market with the first AM2+ chipset. Now with the 770, 790X and 790FX in place, AMD is adding another 7-series chipset to the list. The new release is the much awaited AMD 780G. This chipset features the 780G north bridge and SB700 south bridge.

The GIGABYTE GA-MA780GM-S2H motherboard is one of the first mobos to market featuring the new chipset – AMD is even using it for the press release packs. So, with this in mind, we figured this board would be as good a point as any to take a first look at what the new platform can do.

The SB700 south bridge can support up to six SATA devices, one EIDE port and one floppy port. The RAID functions available for the SATA ports are RAID 1 and RAID 0. Interestingly, GIGABYTE has chosen to only provide five of the six ports internally, with the last port being an eSATA connection on the back I/O panel.

While the SB700 is a step up from the SB600 found paired with the 790FX north bridge, the big news in this release is the 780G north bridge. This implements an integrated graphics processor (IGP) – this is where things begin to get interesting with this platform.

The IGP utilises the 55nm RV610 graphics processor and shares 256MB of the system memory. This chip is more commonly found in the HD2400 graphics card. In the 780G solution, the RV610 is represented as a HD3200 and the core code name changed to RS780. From our testing, we found the chip to rather successfully shift from a low-end discrete card to an integrated GPU. We found the HD3200 to offer some great value for money – especially considering it has been incorporated into a $100 motherboard!

During our tests, the HD3200 integrated graphics processor successfully ran Crysis, albeit at a snails pace, with an average, minimum and maximum FPS of 12.39, 0.00 and 17.60. While the return of 0.00 FPS indicates a complete loss of frames, the fact this pint-sized punter can even run Crysis is quite amazing. Not only that, it managed to pull through 3DMark06 with an understandable 1159 3DMarks.

While it’s no HD3870 X2, this IGP can certainly be proud of what it is and could be used as a low-end solution for games such as the ever-popular Counter Strike: Source while adding it’s own bit to the action in a Hybrid CrossFire solution. But gaming isn’t the only focus of this IGP. Well, to be honest, it’s not really a focus; it’s more a by product.

What this platform truly excels at is providing a basis for a low cost but in-class high performance media center. To test this theory we paired it with an Athlon X2 4850e throughout our testing. This 45W TDP low power chip is its perfect partner.

During playback of full 1080p content, the maximum CPU utilisation seen was just 40 per cent. The reason for this non-CPU-thrashing behaviour is the ability of the RV610 (or RS780, whichever name you wish to use) to decode the 1080p content – effectively reducing the amount of processing to be done by the CPU.

It’s no secret that AMD has been struggling with the high-end enthusiast sector and even the mid-range sector, but this low-cost and highly functional platform could very well turn into a bread and butter winner for AMD.