A new version of the Zotac Mini-ITX motherboard that earned TR Editor’s Choice award has launched. Zotac stuck tightly to the formula of its older GF9300-D-E motherboard—Mini-ITX form factor, LGA775 socket, GeForce 9300 graphics, PCI Express x16 expansion, and Wi-Fi—but it claims to have "tweaked and tuned" the motherboard to make it more desirable.
Left: the old GF9300-D-E. Right: the new GF9300-I-E. (Wi-Fi antennas are cropped out.) Source: Zotac.
The new GF9300-I-E looks almost identical to its older sibling, but its black heatsink conceals a faster version of Nvidia’s GeForce 9300 integrated graphics chipset. Zotac has ramped up the GPU core clock from 450MHz to 580MHz and the shaders from 1200MHz to 1400MHz, which ought to give a little performance boost to folks not interested in populating that PCIe x16 slot with a discrete GPU.
Zotac has also improved upon the GF9300-D-E’s already-impressive tweaking and overclocking options, expanding the range of supported voltage settings for the processor and memory. Users will now be able to undervolt their processors by 0.1V to keep power consumption down. The GF9300-I-E also features one extra internal Serial ATA port (raising the total to three) as well as wake-on-USB support. Zotac talks about "improved compatibility" with larger heatsinks, as well, but the clearance looks pretty much identical on both boards—not that Mini-ITX enclosures have room for some of the larger LGA775 heatsinks, anyway.
Common functionality between the GF9300-D-E and GF9300-I-E includes an external Serial ATA port, onboard 802.11g Wi-Fi, two DDR2-800 DIMM slots, Gigabit Ethernet, and a choice of DVI, HDMI, and VGA display outputs.
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