Memory performance
When Nvidia first launched the GeForce 9300 chipset, its Advanced Path memory controller feature wasn't yet enabled. The 9300-ITX has a BIOS switch for this feature, but unfortunately, the P5N7A does not. Since there's no reason to penalize Zotac for supporting Advance Path, we ran the 9300-ITX with it enabled.

It's a good thing we did, because Advance Path appears to be good for not only a healthy improvement in memory access latency, but also a boost in peak memory bandwidth.

STARS Euler3d computational fluid dynamics
Few folks run fluid dynamics simulations on their desktops, but we've found this multi-threaded test to be particularly demanding of memory subsystems, making it a good link between our memory and application performance tests.

No doubt thanks to Advance Path, the 9300-ITX boasts a higher Euler3d frequency than the Asus board.

WorldBench
WorldBench uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications. It then produces an overall score. WorldBench also spits out individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We'll look at the overall score, and then we'll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

WorldBench runs a little faster on the 9300-ITX than it does on the P5N7A. The difference in overall performance only amounts to two points, but it nicely confirms that the Zotac board doesn't give up any performance in common desktop applications.

Gaming
The GeForce 9300 may be the fastest integrated graphics chipset around, but we still had to lower resolutions and in-game detail levels for most titles to get frame rates that we'd consider smooth and playable.

The Zotac board is no faster than the Asus here, which should come as no surprise considering that both use the same integrated graphics core running at the same clock speeds. Don't get too excited about frame rates in the 30-40FPS range, though. While we were able to run Quake Wars at high detail, we had to drop Episode 2 to medium, Far Cry 2 to low, and turn off most of the graphics effects in Call of Duty.