Performance in Nominal Mode

Finally, when all the problem-causing parts have been successfully identified and replaced I tested Asus M4A78T-E mainboard in the following platform:

• Mainboard: Asus M4A78T-E (Socket AM3, AMD 790GX/SB750, BIOS 0801 from 03.06.09);
• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 810 (Socket AM3, 2.6GHz, 200MHz base frequency, 4MB L3 cache, Deneb, rev. C2, 1.3V Vcore);
• Memory: 2 x 2048MB DDR3 Wintec AMPX PC3-12800, 3AXH1600C9-4096K, (1600MHz, CL9, 1.5-1.9V voltage);
• Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (RV770, 750/750/3600 MHz, 800 SP, 40 TMU, 16 ROP, 256-bit 512MB GDDR5);
• HDD: Samsung SP2504C (250GB, SATA II, 7200RPM, 8MB, rev. A);
• CPU Cooler: Cooler Master GeminII (120-mm Protechnic Electric MGA12012HB-O25 fan, 1500-2500RPM);
• Thermal interface: Noctua;
• PSU: Sunbeamtech NUUO Series SUNNU550-EUAP (550W);
• Case: Antec Skeleton.

We used Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x86 operating system and ATI Catalyst 9.2 graphics card driver. It turned out that if you run a 32-bit OS and use 4GB of RAM, you can increase the amount of memory assigned to the integrated graphics core “for free”. 32-bit Windows Vista can only use 3.3GB of memory, so we could provide our Radeon HD 3300 with the maximum possible amount of 512MB without losing anything. The OS will still have all the 3.3GB it can work with. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the performance of the integrated graphics core will increase dramatically because of that, but it won’t do any harm, that’s for sure.

In fact it is pretty interesting to see how UMA and SidePort technologies actually coexist? Asus M4A78T-E mainboard has 1q28MB of DDR3 memory assigned for graphics subsystem needs through SidePort technology. It works at 1333MHz by default with unknown timings. The integrated graphics card can also use system RAM that can work at a completely different frequency and with different timings. So how do they get synchronized? Will the “excessive” requests the graphics card sends to RAM affect the system performance, can it potentially drop? We tested our system in its nominal mode in order to answer all these questions. In the first test session it was the integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics core that employed the 128MB of default SidePort memory along with 512MB from the system RAM. In the second round of tests there was a discrete Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card with disabled integrated graphics core.

Please disregard the specific numbers showing a tremendous performance difference between a powerful discrete card and a weak integrated graphics core. The tests took a long time but completed successfully, although 3DMark Vantage offered to change the test settings and rerun the test, because the results looked really suspicious.

The main conclusion is that the general system performance doesn’t get affected by the use of the integrated graphics core in those benchmarks where the graphics card has no influence on the final result. As for ATI Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 3300, we all know that we can’t really compare the functionality and potential of the two, even though we use medium quality settings for both in all graphics tests.