Zotac GeForce 9300 WiFi Mini ITX Motherboard
Introduction
Mini ITX. A form factor with a footprint of just 17cm x 17cm, just over 50% smaller in area than Micro ATX. Yes, indeed it is very small. You'd think that with such a small platform, it wouldn't be possible to build a powerful gaming setup with it, right? Well, contrary to what systems of this form factor are generally used for, the release of select Mini ITX boards and cases have made a true Small Form Factor gaming machine a reality.
Zotac is a company that entered the computer hardware industry quite recently and as such lacks much of the well founded reputation that manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte have earned for example. They've grown quickly and while initially a lower tier nVidia graphics card partner, they've also started building their own motherboards. Zotac have conceived some interesting and unique examples such as the GeForce 9300 ITX WiFi, which we will have a look at later on.
In the past, if you wanted a small powerful machine you had two options.
1)The Shuttle XPC
The popular Shuttle XPC lineup of “Barebone” systems, once sat in a market with a plethora of similar setups, remain to be the only major manufacturer of these today. Kitted out with a motherboard of proprietary form factor, a small PSU with plenty of grunt and a lovely range of compact aluminium chassis. However the dreaded P word reared it's ugly head in my previous sentence. Proprietary. Shuttle's XPC motherboards, only bundled with cases and power supply units, are closely related to the Flex ATX form factor but you'll be hard pressed to find such a retail motherboard on the market. This is a bit of a nuisance as the need for a motherboard upgrade or the event of failure will always result in the return or the purchase of a brand new unit altogether. Quality kits but a serious lack of versatility from an upgrade perspective.
2)The Micro ATX Form Factor.
The Micro ATX form factor is rather versatile for it's size. There's a wide range of motherboards from entry level LGA775 and AM2 setups to the high end Crossfire and SLI compliant X58 based Core i7 platform. It comes at a price though. Most respectable mATX chassis' come in two styles. The cube style a'la Lian Li V350 or a micro tower like the Silverstone Sugo SG03. Cases like the Lian Li V350 are beautifully crafted and sports the ability to fit various higher end parts and cooling solutions inside. However, one has to consider the reasons behind going Micro ATX. To save space right? Unfortunately with the footprint of mATX boards being up to 24.4cm x 24.4cm, any case with the motherboard sitting on the floor of it is very wide. The V350 is a rather chubby 28cm in width, eating considerably into desk space. The Sugo SG03 on the other hand is quite well proportioned with it's side mounted PSU but at 36cm in height it's not a lot shorter than the smallest of full ATX cases, making you wonder whether the loss in expandability and cooling potential is worth it?
Ok, so Mini ITX brings size down another notch on the form factor scale. The trade offs are that all of the ports and components sit very close together. You're also limited to a single PCI-E 16x and nothing else if you're following the gaming path, although there are Mini ITX boards with a single PCI-E 1x slot or a single PCI slot. Any other expansion devices you wish to add will need to be USB. Not convenient and you'll have to throw away the idea of a dedicated sound card. Next is the distinct lack of well built cases. Many look rather tacky and/or come with a paltry 200W and lower PSU. Thankfully, we have the Silverstone Sugo SG05 Mini ITX/DTX case, fitted with a Fortron Source built 300W 80PLUS certified PSU making such a build possible!
This motherboard is based on the nVidia nForce 730i MCP "all in one" solution, which see's the introduction of their latest integrated graphics. More on that in the next section!
Initial Impressions, Board Info, Package and Board Layout
The motherboard arrived in a (predictably) small box dressed in bright orange. Included inside is about all the necessities for the motherboard, a rear I/O shield, manual and two SATA cables. The motherboard also came with a USB based internal 802.11g Wireless Adapter, quite handy with the limited expansion offered by the form factor.
I was rather impressed with the board layout and how much Zotac managed to cram onto the baord's PCB, with not a single square inch wasted. Featuring a black PCB and fluorescent orange expansion sockets, it's also aesthetically pleasing for anyone that wishes to opt for a case with a side window to show off their mini computer's innards. Mind you, at around £120 this is certainly a very expensive piece of silicon and plastic real estate so let's hope it's specifications make up for it!
So all in all it's a rather comprehensive package. The GeForce 9300, nVidia's answer to the AMD 790GX/HD 3300 competition, is quite an impressive integrated graphics chip. Supporting Sound over DVI/HDMI which is great for HTPC use. It also has 16 shading units or “CUDA” Processors if you will along with a 450MHz core clock and 1200MHz shader clock making it a decent graphics module for light gaming. We'll see how this performs later on.
Looking at the layout of the motherboard itself, the CPU area has been left fairly clean allowing for most short CPU coolers to fit with ease and while proximity to the chipset is inevitable, the design of the NB cooler seems to have been thought out. The designers have completely done away with the IDE interface and needless to say it was a smart move as the space consumed by a third party controller and the port itself could have eaten away at the modern expansion ports. Something worth noting if you intend on recycling any old Hard Disk Drives or Optical Drives with this motherboard.
Speaking of which this motherboard really has cut back on legacy ports, which is understandable as such boards need space at the rear for a variety of essential modern day interfaces. Offering HDMI, DVI and D-Sub (VGA) you can connect your setup to any monitor or HDTV without the hassle of additional adapters. Zotac has also managed to fit a staggering 6 x USB 2.0 ports in at the rear with a further 6 more available internally, an E-SATA port for external HDD's and 7.1 realtek audio. There's also two further internal SATA ports, two 240pin DDR2 banks and most notably, a full PCI-E 16x slot. Not only is this PCI-E 16x slot physically 16x it is also electrically 16x, meaning there's no loss of bandwith at all as a result of space constraints or cost cutting. Like all Mini ITX boards when it comes to the expansion PCI/AGP/PCI-E slot, it sits on the outermost edge of the board, so it's worth noting that you'll be constrained to single slot occupying graphics cards unless your case of choice has more space to the left (i.e.- if the case also supports Mini DTX or Micro ATX).
Test Setup
The components used were as follows
Core 2 Duo E8400 C0 3.00GHz
2GB Patriot PC2-6400 RAM
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB SATA II HDD
Xpertvision GeForce 8800GT 512mb
Silverstone Sugo SG05 / 300W 80PLUS PSU
BIOS and Overclocking
Zotac has used the familiar Phoenix BIOS, and as such everything is somewhat conventional in terminology and function. I'm sure you're all wondering what overclocking and tweaking options this motherboard offers. Well, coming from a DFI LanParty Jr. P45 T2RS and a Biostar Tforce I45 P45 motherboard, it seems rather lacking at first sight but really all the crucial overclocking variables are accessible barring the CPU Multiplier.
The naming scheme of variables are near enough the generic terms making it easy for beginners to cross reference guides with what they see on screen. Like all nForce Intel Edition boards, Front Side Bus speeds are stated in Quad Pumped “Effective” terms, which I personally find a bit irritating. The following are the max BIOS Voltage increments
CPU - Up to +0.3V in 0.025V increments
VDimm - Up to 2.1V in 0.100V increments
NB Vcore - Up to 1.25V in 0.050V increments
This little motherboard doesn't really have much space for hidden sleeves but it certainly pulled these astonishing figures out from somewhere! Carefully increasing the FSB and observing it's behaviour accordingly, I could feel my gut telling me to anticipate it to freeze at post, fall into infinite power cycles and not boot at all. Not pleasant when it's not even easy to access the CMOS battery or jumper. After a fairly good run, at 380FSB I received no signal to the monitor and that was that. Much to my surprise, it also proved to be very forgiving to failed overclocks. A simple push of the hard reset button sprun the board to life again where it proceeded to tell me that I've been a bit of a berk. A 0.05V increase to the nominal NB Voltage of 1.1V allowed me to continue to 380FSB. I finally hit a maximum FSB of 405FSB or a 1620QFSB, whichever notation you prefer. Any higher resulted in the board failing to boot.
Nothing ground breaking as far as Intel motherboards go in general but for a board of this size, chipset and power regulation configuration, I'd say it's certainly beyond acceptable!
Disk Performance
Generally Disk performance seemed no worse or better than the SB750 and ICH10R southbridges I've tested with this Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB HDD Hard Disk Drive. There's no cause for concern here.
Random Access: 15.4ms
Burst Speed: 137.7MB/sec
Average Read Speed: 60.5MB/sec
Memory Performance
Now it's all well and good having a nice set of quality RAM but it's not very useful if you happen to pick a motherboard with a poor memory controller. This quick test highlights the capability of the nForce MCP used on this Zotac board. Due to constraints at this point in time, I'm only able to compare the results with SiSoft Sandra's database.
Integer Memory Bandwith Performance / GB/s
nForce 730i MCP - 5.23
Intel P35 MCH - 5.32
Float Memory Bandwith Performance / GB/s
nForce 730i MCP - 5.26
Intel P35 MCH - 5.32
The results show that nVidia's nForce MCP is able to keep up with the equivalent Intel chipset in memory performance.
Integrated GPU Performance
So here's a quick reminder of the GPU's specification
Stream Processors/”CUDA Units” - 16
Core Clock – 450MHz
Shader Clock – 1200MHz
Memory – 0MB (Shared)
So all in all it looks like a respectable integrated graphics module, though it is disadvantaged by the lack of onboard dedicated memory. Another thing that may interest is that the BIOS also offers the ability to overclock the GeForce 9300 GPU Core and Shader frequencies as well. By using this facility I reached a maximum core frequency of 650MHz, a 200MHz increase over reference clocks and a maximum shader frequency 1450MHz, a respectable 250MHz increase. One has to wonder whether there's any point as the weakness of the integrated GeForce 9300 lies with it's Stream Processor count and lack of decated memory rather than frequencies. Regardless, it's a nice feature to have and it did result in fair frequency increases. Anyway, here's some test results.
Let's get down to more practical and likely uses for such a graphics module. I stated many many paragraphs above that sound over HDMI is supported, implying that this graphics module is being aimed at the HTPC user. So how does it fair with High Definition video?
Microsoft HD Content Showcase – Fighter Pilot HD – CPU Usage
720p – 19% AVG
1080p – 24% AVG
Microsoft HD Content Showcase – Super Speedway HD– CPU Usage
720p – 14%
1080p – 18%
Increased Core and Shader frequencies didn't seem to affect CPU Utilisation at all.
Futuremark 3DMark06 - 1280x1024 0xAA,0xAF
450/1200 - 1892 3DMarks
650/1450 - 2040 3DMarks
To me this seems to be a pretty good result. I recall getting similar scores from my nVidia GeForce 7300GT and ATi Radeon X800 series graphics cards. I suspect games from the era of those graphics cards should run rather well with integrated graphics chipsets like these.
Microsoft Flight Simulator X - 1280x1024 0xAA,0xAF
This test particularly surprised me. A five minute flight around Seattle in one of the most poorly coded games around today resulted in a reasonably fluid gaming operation, given that this is a rather passive game where nothing seems to be moving too quickly or unpredictably.
Frequency | Min/Max/AVG (fps)
450/1200 | 19.0/31.0/25.8
650/1450 | 20.0/34.0/27.5
While it is true that Microsoft Flight Simulator X is heavily dependant on the Processor, it also requires a fair amount of GPU grunt as well to perform consistently well. These framerates certainly don't suggest that this is a great choice for such a game but what it does show is that it is possible to play some of the more demanding games out there today without feeling the need to throw one's computer out of the window.
Wifi Adapter Performance
The bundled Wireless adapter offered more than acceptable range and during the testing period did not drop out from the nearest access point.
Conclusion
On the whole, this is a very impressive product. Zotac have succeeded at targeting a product at both power HTPC and Gaming audiences and with it's comprehensive feature set, competitive performance, good board layout and aesthetics it really does stand above all other similar Mini ITX motherboards on the market. It is not an affordable purchase though and not even the best Mini ITX motherboards can get around the inevitable issue of restricted expansion. If however you believe that the Mini ITX form factor is for you and you're after a motherboard that will be the platform for your powerful mid to high end components, then I can truly say that this is the one to get!
Pro's
Excellent motherboard layout
Overclocks well
Reasonable accessory bundle
Con's
Considerably more expensive than other ITX boards
Comments and Questions Welcomed
