Power consumption
We measured system power consumption, sans monitor and speakers, at the wall outlet using a Watts Up Pro power meter. Power consumption was measured at idle and under a load consisting of a multi-threaded Cinebench 10 render running in parallel with the "rthdribl" high dynamic range lighting demo. Results that fall under "No power management" were obtained with Windows Vista running in high performance mode, while those with power management enabled were taken with Vista in its balanced performance mode.

Despite its swanky single-chip package, the GeForce 8300 appears to consume more power than the two-chip 780G. The GeForce board's power consumption is 10W higher at idle and nearly 20W higher under load.

Overclocking
We didn't expect Zotac's GeForce 8300 board to overclock well given the BIOS's relative lack of tweaking options, but we gave it a spin with a Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition CPU anyway. Unfortunately, since the BIOS lacks CPU multiplier control, we had to confine our testing to ramping up the CPU base clock.

Our board had no problems booting with a 220MHz base clock, but our four-way Prime95 stress test quickly spit out errors, even with additional chipset voltage applied. However, we did manage to get the board stable and error-free with a 210MHz base clock and the default chipset voltage.

Obviously, this board isn't built for overclocking. If you really want to turn up the clocks on a Phenom, we'd recommend a standard desktop motherboard with support for the Black Edition's unlocked upper multiplier.

Peripheral performance
Core logic chipsets integrate a wealth of peripherals, but they don't handle everything. Firewire and audio are farmed out to auxiliary chips, for example. To provide a closer look at the peripheral performance you can expect from the motherboards we've tested today, we've complied Firewire and audio performance results below. We've used motherboard rather than chipset names here because these performance characteristics reflect the auxiliary peripheral chips used on each board rather than the performance of the core logic chipset.

The Zotac board's VIA Firewire chip looks pretty good in our performance tests.

Despite scoring lower in three of RightMark Audio Analyzer's component tests, the Zotac board's overall score still matches that of the Gigabyte. We conducted these tests using RMAA's loopback option, which routes the motherboard's stereo output through its line input.