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Cooling
Lower cost boards ship with simple heatsinks on the northbridge and southbridge
while those targeted at enthusiasts typically have large heatpipe coolers and
heatsinks on the voltage regulation modules near the CPU socket. A well-cooled
motherboard can deliver better power efficiency and stability.
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Heatsink Temperatures
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Measuring Point
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X2 4850e
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Phenom II
X4 940
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SB Heatsink
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55°C
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56°C
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NB Heatsink
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68°C
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67°C
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VRMs
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60-70°C
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90-130°C
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Measured with a spot thermometer after 15 minutes
of full CPU + GPU load. CPU fan reduced to 6V.
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Despite the rather diminutive heatsinks deployed on the KA760GM, the northbridge
and southbridge heatsinks did not overheat during stress testing, staying below
70°C when a X2 4850e processor was used. With a Phenom II chip, the temperatures
of the VRMs skyrocketed, with several measuring well over 100°C. The system
did remain stable, but it is certainly within the realm of possibility that
such stress over a long period of time could be detrimental to the health and
stability of the board. A VRM heatsink would have been a welcome addition.
3D Performance
To get a rough estimate of how well each board's integrated graphics plays
games, we ran 3DMark05/06. As synthetic benchmarks they have limited value,
but they give a rough idea of how well an IGP performs.
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3D Performance: Futuremark Comparison
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Motherboard
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Graphics
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3DMark05
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3DMark06
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Gigabyte MA74GM-S2
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X2100
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1124
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305
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Zotac GeForce 8200-ITX
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GF8200
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1623
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869
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Asus M3N78 Pro
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GF8300
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1669
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902
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MSI KA760GM
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HD 3000
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2289
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1049
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Gigabyte MA78GM-2SH
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HD 3200
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2293
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1116
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Gigabyte MA790GP-DS4H (Sideport)
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HD 3300 (Sideport)
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3377
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1668
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Gigabyte MA78GM-2SH
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HD 3450
(Discrete)
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3405
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1716
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All results with 2GB of system RAM and 256MB of
VRAM assigned for IGP's (128MB Sideport + 128MB UMA for boards with Sideport
memory).
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The HD 3000 IGP scored very closely to HD 3200 in 3DMark, suggesting that
HD 3000 is simply HD 3200 minus the video decoding capabilities.
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