The Zotac a NVIDIA endorsed company; sell quite anything from NVIDA boards to graphics card solutions. For the 730i series of integrated and also even a media board PC’s. For Zotac, there happy enough to go with the new integrated chipset VGA, with the support of DX10 games and HI-DEF movie playback and decoding.
The MCP7a, as it is called goes to a micro ATX form factor with the single type Bridge that controls both of the peripherals and also the memory and CPU traffic and covered with a cooler fan. With a black PCB colour and a convenient place for a power cable to be, right on top of the board. But still having old electrolyte capacitors in the board, it is not for those long lasting boards that go a mile until something gives up, and also not an overclockers dream either. Yes, it has a two digit POST diagnosis and also a power reset button built-in the board, you wouldn’t expect the four phase PWM’s to give little bit more juice when over-clocked.
With boards like these you need to cramp up as much space as you can, with the Micro ATX you need to compensate some of the stuff in the board with a Full-ATX forma factor. The four slot RMA is still visible and one PCIex 2.0 and two PCI slots can be used, and the support of any CPU with a frequency of up to 1333MHz or to 800MHz Pentium 4 to Intel Core 2 Quads, with me I never place an Extreme CPU like a QX6850, because of the power hassles I need to consider. With the others are six SATA ports, one IDE and one Floppy port, memory slot with DDR2 memory up to 8GB max and also the hybrid SLI on any 9500/9600 graphics. For the back panel ports are four USB 2.0, one VGA and DVI port and also a HDMI port for those HD TV’s and two PS/2 ports and one Gigabit Ethernet.
The performance sake of the board, for the memory performance is not in some respect good for most high applications when need to push the board into its limits, with the raw performance is little low against the G45 and also slow with the latencies from their 750i counterpart. The PCU tests are practically the same all-round with their own chipset, just going better with the G43 chipset.
For practical reason the Zotac can be an acceptable board for most PC media systems with the G45 or even the 750i going better on the discrete graphics solution, but for the NVIDIA hybrid SLI is a good side of the 9300 for power saving and no need for a expansion of graphics, this can be a half way overclockable board with DX10 and HDMI built-in playback.