790GX BIOS' and Zotac GF8300 lab notes

When we posted our 790GX preview there were still a few significant problems with the motherboards and drivers.  Mind you, the problems we encountered primarily revolved around overclocking and other performance settings on the motherboards.  Stock operation and stability were never a problem for us, but stepping outside of the norm created a fair share of frustrating moments for us.  In addition, the beta drivers that implemented PowerPlay had their own set of problems with CrossFire X operation along with some weird interactions with our TV tuner and network cards in the PCI slots.

Our final opinion was that this launch occurred about two weeks early.  As such, the motherboard suppliers and AMD have been in overtime mode to get the boards and drivers tuned properly.  The good news is the last set of BIOS releases we have received from ASUS, Gigabyte, Foxconn, and MSI have solved about 95% of our problems.  The last five percent are mainly performance or tuning requests that we deem optional for the most part.  The last set of beta drivers have improved overall stability and performance greatly along with CrossFire operating correctly.  Granted, the 8.7 Catalyst drivers will work fine, but performance enhancements and PowerPlay improvements in the latest 8.8 betas have us wishing that AMD would get the final drivers out quickly.

Based on these improvements, we have commenced final testing on our retail kits and should have the final review up in a few days.  In the meantime, we are posting the BIOS releases utilized in our roundup.  These BIOS releases are not final code and will not be officially supported by the manufacturers, however, we think they are stable enough to review and provide significant improvements in our opinion.  As such, we think they will benefit our readers who have already purchased 790GX products.  Just remember, flash at your own risk.

Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H BIOS F1B

ASUS M3A78-T BIOS 0304

Foxconn A7DA-S BIOS P04

MSI DKA790GX Platinum BIOS 1.1 (note- K9A2GX Digital board will not be offered)

Zotac GF8300 -

The Zotac GF8300 has been nicknamed "Tank" in the labs. Based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8300 mGPU chipset, this uATX motherboard offers a single-chip core design, graphics based on the GeForce 8400GS GPU with the GPU core clocked at 500MHz and the 16 stream processors at 1.5GHz, HyperTransport 3.0, Gigabyte Ethernet, PCI Express 2.0 connectivity,  six SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 5 options and 12 USB 2.0 ports.  The GeForce 8300 is HTPC friendly with PureVideo HD decoding offering 100% offloading (HDCP calculations are still on the CPU) of AVC (H.264), VC-1, and MPEG2 content along with 8-channel LPCM bitstreaming over HDMI.  TrueHD and DTS-HD audio formats are not supported via bitstreams but 8-channel LPCM is leagues ahead of the 2-channel capability offered by the AMD 780G/790GX.  To top it off, this chipset offers support for NVIDIA's GeForce Boost and HybridPower technologies.

With the overview out of the way, the reason we call this little board "Tank" is that is has spent the last three weeks running our 9950BE and 9850BE processors under a wide variety of conditions for an upcoming IG review.  Although Zotac does not officially list support for the Black Edition Phenoms, this board has handled them with aplomb.  Granted we have not overclocked the processors, but for HTPC and home server duty, we have not seen a need to increase our clock speeds.  While the integrated graphics performance of the GeForce 8300 mGPU does not match that of the AMD 780G or the new 790GX in gaming, it does offer reasonable performance for older titles.  In addition, Zotac opened up the BIOS in version 2K080718 by offering the ability to overclock the core and stream processors.  We have reached a 650MHz core clock and 1.75GHz stream processor clock that has improved performance about 5%~9% in several titles.

We will take a closer look at this chipset and board shortly, but in the meantime, layout quirks aside (power connectors), the Zotac GF8300 deserves your attention if you are looking for a HTPC or home server motherboard on the cheap.