Our testing methods
Today we'll be exploring the GeForce 8300's performance against its closest rival, the AMD 780G. We're using a B2-stepping Phenom 9600 here due to the fact that we don't have a 780G board compatible with our 9850 Black Edition CPU. AMD's performance-robbing TLB erratum patch was disabled on both boards for testing. We're also using slightly looser memory timings than normal since we had to begin testing before Zotac managed to come up with a BIOS with memory timing controls.

Because of the numerous problems associated with running the 780G's disk controller in AHCI mode, we settled on IDE mode, which doesn't support Native Command Queuing. AHCI has been an issue for AMD chipsets for a while now, so we're not inclined to cut them any slack. By contrast, the GeForce 8300's AHCI implementation appears to work flawlessly.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged.

Processor AMD Phenom 9600 2.3GHz
System bus 1.8GHz HyperTransport
Motherboard Zotac GeForce 8300 Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
Bios revision AD4PR929 F4C
North bridge Nvidia GeForce 8300 AMD 780G
South bridge AMD SB700
Chipset drivers ForceWare 175.16 Catalyst 8.5
Memory size 2GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 DDR2 SDRAM at ~800MHz
CAS latency (CL) 5 5
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 5 5
RAS precharge (tRP) 7 7
Cycle time (tRAS) 18 18
Audio codec Realtek ALC888 with 1.92 drivers Realtek ALC889A with 1.92 drivers
Hard drive Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB SATA
OS Windows Vista Ultimate x86 with Service Pack 1

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing.

All of our test systems were powered by OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply units. Thanks to OCZ for providing these units for our use in testing.

Finally, we'd like to thank Western Digital for sending Raptor WD1500ADFD hard drives for our test rigs.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.