August 11th 2009 03:04 pm
A better budget PC with AMD 785G
The new AMD 785G chipset
The days are numbered when IGP (integrated graphic processor) offers miserable graphic performance. Thanks to AMD, we got a very solid IGP solutions with the 780G chipset released last year. A year later, which is today, AMD bumped up and inject the 780G with extra speed and some tweaks here and there. And voila, we got the 785G.
The new 785G supports any current Phenom II, Athlon II and the older brethren Athlon X2. The 780G will be phased out once 785G is in full production swing. 785G will be positioned between 780G and 790GX, but will eventually replace 780G.
Motherboard with AMD 785G chipset will come with SB710 southbridge. The SB710 southbridge is a an improvement over the SB700 southbridge. It’s basically a SB750 southbridge (which comes with 790GX) minus RAID 5 support, which is not much an issue considering majority of users never use RAID at all.
However, one issue with the 785G is the lack of support for 8 channel LPCM over HDMI. The older 780G and 790GX doesn’t have 8 channel LPCM support and many were hoping AMD to upgrade a little for this new 785G chipset. A bit of disappointment for those planning to do a 7.1 channel HTPC system. Well, for most of us, a 2 channel is already sufficient enough for a great audio experience.
Some of the improvements over 780G are:
- Faster graphics with AMD HD 4200 graphics
- DirectX 10.1 support
- ATI stream technology
- Universal Video Decoder 2.0(UVD)
- AMD powerplay
With AMD HD 4200 build in to 785G, we can expect DirectX10.1 support. However, clockspeed remained the same at 500MHz. But 785G motherboard usually comes with DDR3 sideport memory, so we can see some extra frame rates over 780G.
For those working on Microsoft Powerpoint or using the Cyberlink’s Espresso media converter, you’ll be delighted to have 785G as your working companion. With ATI Stream, expect to see substantial performance improvement where it offloads the processing power to the 40 stream processor at 500MHz each. More than 2times the performance gain without upgrading the processor, how’s that? More applications will be taking advantage of this ATI Stream GPGPU technology in the future.
Watching HD videos just got better with UVD 2.0. With additional features for BD video like picture in picture, dynamic contrast and better HD post processing.
Another big improvement is the AMD Powerplay. It dynamically adjust the clockspeed of the chipset anywhere from 60MHz idle to 500MHz full load. The new Powerplay adjust the clockspeed constantly depending on the work load on the GPU. Think of it as the Cool n Quiet feature of Phenom II. A greener PC indeed.
This new chipset has been released by AMD on the early of August’09 and expect to see the availability at your local store soon. Pairing a budget Athlon II (don’t be fooled by the Athlon name, it’s a Phenom II in disguised without the L3 cache) and 785G can be seen as a perfect couple stealing market shares away from Intel’s G41 and nvidia 9400 IGP solutions, but not for HTPC enthusiast.
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