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Recommended Book
PCI Express System Architecture (PC System Architecture Series)
By Tom Shanley
Addison-Wesley Professional
Price: $39.99

Home » Motherboard
ECS GF8200A Black Series Motherboard Review
Author: Gabriel Torres
Type: Reviews Last Updated: July 9, 2008
Page: 5 of 13
$ Check REAL-TIME pricing for Elitegroup GF8200 MCP78S AM2+ Atx 32GB Pcie 3PCI 2PCIE (GF8200A) Motherboard $
Amazon: $89.93

How We Tested

During our benchmarking sessions we used the configuration listed below. Between our benchmarking sessions the only variable device was the motherboard being tested and the addition or removal of a “real” video card (Sapphire Radeon HD 3450).

Hardware Configuration

Software Configuration

  • Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
  • Service Pack 1
Driver Versions
  • nVidia nForce driver version (includes video driver): 18.11
  • ATI motherboard/video driver version: Catalyst 8.6
Used Software

Some Information About our Methodology

Both motherboards included in our comparison were configured with 256 MB shared memory.

Since we were reviewing a low-end motherboard with on-board video, we were very interested in comparing its 3D video performance with the performance achieved by its main competitor and also with a very low-end video card, so we could have an idea of how slower on-board video is compared to a very inexpensive video card. We chose Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 with 256 MB and 64-bit memory interface because this is one of the cheapest video cards available today.

Also because we are talking about an entry-level system, we chose an entry-level CPU to go with the motherboard, an Athlon X2 4600+. This CPU doesn't suffer from the problem some AMD CPUs have of not being able to access memories at their full speed.

Even though we had DDR2-1066 memories, we configured them as DDR2-800 units, for two reasons. First, entry-level PCs won’t use DDR2-1066 memories and, second, Athlon X2 can only access memories up to 800 MHz.

We tried to use 3DMark Vantage but this program couldn’t run even on its lowest configuration.

Error Margin

We adopted a 3% error margin. Thus differences below 3% cannot be considered relevant. In other words, products with a performance difference below 3% should be considered as having similar performance.

Pages (13): « 1 2 3 4 [5] 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 »
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