With the ATI and AMD going the 790GX board with integrated graphics of the HD 3300, and the Intel brand going with their own integrated products like the G35 and the G45, with the most people buying the Intel and ATI/AMD board for quick integrated solution, you expect NVIDIA going with their own integrated boards. But the NVIDIA’s GeForce 9300/9400 of their integrated board solutions, is better version of the older 8300 series, with these boards supporting Directx10.0 when they are first release, but not good at rendering high –end games but good enough for decoding movies and HI-def ones. With it really goes on AMD’s competition, the older 8300 was only excluded to the AMD platform only and now it can go to an Intel one, with the support of both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, it can be fit as a high performance and low cost board in memory, while coming in a small MINI-ATX form factor.
The ASUS P5N7A-VM, as usual has a small form factor, great for those small cases, and in turn a small media PC in the corner of the room, with the also no South and North bridge chips, you can only see a single rectangular heat sink that has both North and South in one die chip, which is known as the 9300 chipset. They support a single PCIex slot for a discrete graphics with Hybrid SLI with any 9500.9600 graphics with also the usual Six SATA ports, (in this is only five internal and one external) with no other chipset to support any more peripherals, this may be enough for some users.
For others the Audio driver of the ASUS is a new Realtek ALC1200 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC, the new version of the Audio system that can decode HD sound while it has not publishes the Audio driver in their own website, the ASUS P5N7A, by the way, ASUS can sometimes show products that are not out in public yet, and make a name for themselves. But for that you can’t blame them with innovation to bring everything to the consumer.
For the benchmark of the ASUS’s Geforce 9300/9400 chipset, The SiSoftsandra recorded the score of the Intel G45 ad the Intel G35 with other integrated chipsets with the same CPU and memory, the ASUS got a fraction faster than the other Geforce 9300 chipsets, and beaten the Intel G45 by the same specs. While the decoding on HI-def movies, is also faster o the ASUS and audio, with a faster chip from Realtek, and a basic layout of peripherals, the P5N7A can get more speed when it needs, while enough for expanding other items, like a PCIex 1x lane.
With ASUS, the Chipset in it is basic and quiet fast in respects, while the Intel G45 has in par with the Geforce 9300, but it struggles in some of the games in mid-high detail with no AAF on. While the GeForce is an alternative to the AMD’s 790GX with no fan on AMD, but the lack of dual cores, but having full solid capacitors, and a solid performance if you keep the things at a low, with a combo an Intel E8500 for about $200, you wouldn’t miss the price bargain.
