Relieved, Nathan Davis finds it isn't the size of the package, it's how it's used.
Brandishing the new VIA K8M800 northbridge chipset, this is one of the first Athlon 64 motherboards outfitted with onboard video to hit the market. And this incredibly tiny Micro ATX board measures a mere 24.5cm x 23cm.
By default, this motherboard is completely silent, with simply a small heatsink clipped to the northbridge. That's as far as cooling goes and this is all it really needs. Even though the graphics controller is under the same heatsink, it barely jumps above lukewarm, even under full use. You'll see why.
It's definitely well equipped, considering the board's size, with two SATA RAID-capable ports, two PATA ATA133 channels, support for DDR400 memory (two DIMM slots), a FireWire header, four USB 2.0 ports, six-channel audio (although it's only an AC'97 chip) and a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port. Nothing overly jaw dropping, but these are considerable features for a board of this magnitude. It's freaking tiny.
VIA SATA controllers can generally be a royal pain in the arse, so we were happy not to come across any major irritating problems. However, being a VIA SATA controller, drivers are required even if you're simply using the controller as BASE and not RAID.
The onboard VIA S3 UniChrome2 IGP is really the one and only difference between a VIA K8T800 and a VIA K8M800 chipset. This new graphics controller sports dual pixel pipelines, running at a 200MHz core speed and supporting up to 64MB of system memory.
Since ATI unleashed its powerful RS300 - RADEON 9100 IGP - chip onto the market, our expectations have risen dramatically as to the performance we expect from onboard video. The UniChrome2 controller has some serious competition and unfortunately it fails dismally for anything other than standard 2D tasks.
We found the onboard graphics to be seriously lacking both power and functionality. The blighter wouldn't even consider loading Call of Duty and would only run the first game test in 3DMark2003, delivering a feeble score of 110 3DMarks. The Codecreatures benchmark also wouldn't load.
Check out the results and you can see the GeForce FX 5200 beat the jocks off it. Seeing as VIA pimps the controller as a ‘2D/3D engine', this level of functionality is not impressive. Luckily, it has an AGP 8x slot.
The lack of any decent pixel shader support - and even proper hardware support for DirectX 8.0 - was the sole source of our problems. If you're after some decent onboard 3D graphics, the leader in this is still ATI with its mighty RS300. Its pixel shader supports up to version 1.4 and fully supports DirectX 8.1.
However, aside from the lacklustre graphics, we found its performance in comparison to a full-sized K8T800 mobo relatively good. We strapped the mobos onto an Athlon 64 3200+ and 512MB of DDR400 memory, sharing 64MB of this out to the K8M800-MLV's onboard video.
The results speak for themselves; the board even managed to creep ahead slightly in SiSoft's memory test. In PCMark04, it dropped off a tad, but the majority of this was due to the video card tests, in which the FX 5200 had a significant speed advantage.
Looking at the bigger picture, sure, the onboard video was startlingly nasty, but the mobo's performance made up for this. It performs about the same as that of a significantly larger motherboard, albeit now edging around the similar price point. Whack in a decent AGP video card and sound card, and this baby would make a top miniature platform for gaming.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012