We could say that this is so far the best IGP. It’s clear that it is based on great IGP ATi 3200 with difference in clocks. Thanks to reduced dissipation, clock of new 3300 IGP is increased at 700MHz, with possibility of overclock from BIOS of motherboard or from Overdrive utility. Number of points in 3D mark tests reached figures that we saw few years ago on discrete mainstream GPUs. This IGP has 40 Unified Shaders that provide better performances in DX9 titles comparing to some older discreet GPUs.

Still, main performance delimiter for integrated graphics is small memory flow rate and lack of fill rate. The reason for this is very simple - increase of flow rate and number of TMU units would only complicate IGP design and therefore whole motherboard and big problem will be in that case heat dissipation, which isn’t welcomed on any motherboard. Still, we are talking here about PC motherboard and not about some game console.

All things considered, IGP 3300 is great balance of low consumption and IGP performances. IGP 3300 has UVD (Unified Video Decoder) that together with Avivo HD helps in reproduction of HD videos. MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 playback are supported and HDCP support enables output for Blu-ray/HD-DVD videos on big screens. Support exists also for SurroundView technology for two monitors or up to four if you use separate graphics card.


Overclocking experience

We got in our test lab two 790GX motherboards: Foxconn A7DA-S and Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H. For this test we had on our disposal three-core Phenom 8750 with locked multiplier so to examine overclock margin we needed to increase frequencies of HTT bus which is actually a harder way of achieving great overclock especially if motherboard doesn’t have advanced settings for frequency and voltage of northbridge.

Foxconn A7DA-S fell off at start as top overclocker because of lack of these options. Still, with this motherboard we managed to get a decent result from 3GHz and for NB 2250MHz at frequency of HTT link at 250MHz. If some of next BIOS versions enable change of voltage and frequency for NB, overclock margin will be much higher. On the other hand, Gigabyte produced motherboard with nicely built BIOS and with all possible settings that wouldn’t be ashamed of even some DFI motherboards. Thanks to that, maximum clock that we got for our X3 processor is impressive 3.36GHz, but that was still far from stabile operating conditions.