Intel DG45FC: Loaded LGA775 Mini-ITX Board

3D PERFORMANCE

To get a rough estimate of how well the DG45FC onboard video plays games, we ran 3DMark05/06. As a synthetic benchmark, it has limited value, but it should give you a rough idea of how well it performs.

In 3DMark05, it registered almost the exact score as the X3500-equiped Asus P5E-VM HDMI, but its 3DMark06 result was substantially higher, even better than nVidia's Geforce 8300 IGP for AM2. While many speculated X4500 would exhibit a dramatic performance increase over X3500 such as the leap AMD/ATI made between from its Radeon X1250 IGP to HD3200, this simply wasn't the case, at least not with the 3DMark benchmark. While it is the best Intel has to offer, X4500, like most integrated GPUs, is best suited for 2D use. As the DG45FC only has a single PCI-E 1x expansion slot, there are very few upgrade options.

HDMI OUTPUT

Connecting the board to our 19" BenQ monitor via HDMI resulted in several problems at the native resolution of 1440x900. The image was slightly zoomed in, the text was somewhat distorted, and a warning dialog box appeared recommending we use 1280x720.

Switching to 1280x720 only resolved the text issue — the other problems persisted, even the warning box. As the image wasn't completely on the screen, only a small corner of the "Start" button was visible. Increasing the height of the Windows Taskbar made it more usable, but it was still an annoying problem. The audio functionality worked perfectly and straight out of the box without having to change any settings and we received clear stereo sound via the monitor's headphone output. Take these results with a grain of salt, it may behave differently when connected to a different monitor.