Introduction:
The GIGABYTE that we know today got its start in 1986 as a research and development company. From there they have moved into the forefront of computer and electronics design and manufacturing. GIGABYTE offers some of the most innovative designs in mainboards and graphics cards you can find. With their amazing line of Silent II midrange GPUs as well higher end GPUs and mainboards GIGABYTE has made a name for itself in the increasingly fickle computer market.
Today we take a look not at the top of the line, but at a product aimed at the HTPC and entry level market the GA-MA78GM-S2H this board boasts an integrated DX10 compatible GPU. Let’s see how well it does.
Product: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: April 2nd 2008
Product cost: $99.00 to $105.99 (online pricing)
Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Jason Hambly
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
I have noticed a trend in computer parts packaging that I am beginning to like. Gone are the cartoon characters that have nothing to do with the hardware inside as well as all of the garish colors. Manufacturers are now using more visually subdued packaging while maintaining enough flash to grab the eye. Once they have caught your eye they allow you to read the virtues of the product by carefully placed logos and small paragraphs of information. The GA-MA78GM-S2H follows this trend. The box is a slate grey in the center fading to white at the outer edges, in the center is a single graphic of an “S” with a “2” in the lower curve of the S. Above this are the logos pronouncing the features of the mainboard inside.
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Once you do open the box you will find that GIGABYTE was very sparing with the accessories they put in the box providing only 2 SATA, 1 floppy and 1 PATA cable along with the I/O shield, manual and drivers/utility CD-ROM you are not paying for any extras here. Underneath this sparse haul we find the GA-MA78GM safely wrapped in a static bag waiting to be put through its paces.
{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
The layout of a mainboard can have a big impact on its use and performance. Poor placement of drive ports, PCI and PCIe slots, CPU socket and memory slots can not only make a board difficult to use but also hinder airflow. This produces pockets of hot air around components which in turn affect the performance of the parts.
The GA-MA78GM-S2H has a decent layout and provides for good airflow. The placement of the SATA ports is a little odd though. For some reason GIGABYTE chose to put the ports vertical instead of horizontal. This puts multiple SATA cables in front of the PCI slots, exactly where most cases have their HDD fans, this could prevent air flow across any cards in these slots. Something that caught my eye as I looked over this board was a series of pins labeled TPM, it would seem that the MA78GM has support for an add-in TPM (Trusted Platform Module) this would allow users to take advantage of the Bitlocker feature in Vista Ultimate, although I am not sure where you would purchase one.
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The I/O ports on the back are rather impressive for a UMA board. With an e-SATA port, HDMI, Optical SPDiF out DVI, 1394a, and 4 USB ports the MA78GM is pretty loaded up.
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{mospagebreak title=Features and BIOS}
Features and Bios:
Features:
The MA78GM-S2H is not what you would call a feature packed board, but it is also not devoid of them.
The biggest of them (and the most suspect) is the DX10 support. This is displayed proudly on the box and on the actual board itself. But can a UMA GPU with shared memory have enough moxie to deal with the advanced API of DX10? It is something we wanted to know as well and is covered in more detail below. One other feature that is wrapped up in the GPU is the HDMI output with HDCP support. This is certainly a nice feature if you plan on building the MA78GM into your next HTPC box. Next on the GPU features list is AMD’s Hybrid graphics support, this allows you to combine the power of an additional AMD (3000 series) GPU with the onboard 780 GPU to power high-end gaming. Not too bad when you consider the cost of the MA78GM and one of the lower prices AMD cards.
Additional features of the board come in the form of external connectivity. GIGABYTE, as with most of their board, have given the MA78GM USB, Firewire and e-SATA ports to satisfy all of your external needs. BluRay lossless audio support Digital Optical out and support for an add-in TPM module round out the extras on the MA78GM.
BIOS:
The BIOS on the GA-MA78GM is pretty functional for a micro-ATX board. It has many features you would expect on higher end boards and allows for a decent amount of tweaking to get the most out of your system.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words (and several hours of typing):
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{mospagebreak title=Performance I}
Performance:
Test system:
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H Mainboard
AMD X2 5000+ Black Edition
2GB Kingston KHX7200D2K2/2G
1x 74GB Western Digital Raptor HDD
16x Sony DVD-ROM
Generic 1.44” Floppy
Mushkin 1.1KW PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooler
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (x86 and x64 versions)
System Tests:
Memory:
The memory subsystem on the MA78GM is driven by the AMD CPU that you use on the board. If, for example, you had a CPU with a 2GHz memory controller you would get better performance from your memory than if you are using a 1GHz or 1.8GHz memory controller. With the 5000+ , which has a 1GHz memory controller I was able to get pretty good results from the Kingston DDR2 800 that I was working with, of course memory performance is going to be hindered slightly by the shared video memory. For my testing I had the shared memory amount set to 512MB. This allowed me to set resolutions up to 1920×1200 and helped with gaming and video playback performance, but had an effect on system memory performance as you can see from the screen shots below.
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Audio:
The audio on the MA78GM was surprisingly good, the sound in gaming and DVD playback was rich a full without any noticeable stutters or anomalies in reproduction.
BluRay playback was also very good.
Drive Performance:
Drive performance was a little less than what I expected it would seem that the overall file system performance is hindered by the shared memory. But if you are using this as an HTPC or an entry level system you should not notice any significant performance hit.
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Application performance:
PCMark Vantage:
PCMark Vantage is a decent platform for testing how well your system can handle today’s multimedia computer experience. What does this mean? Well it means that in today’s computing world everything is driven by a multimedia experience. Simply browsing a web site is an assault of video and flash animation. Installing a program often has embedded flash or shock wave. Consumers are doing more and more with their PCs and PCMark Vantage is there to let you know if your system can handle it.
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X64 |
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32Bit |
64Bit |
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The MA78GM did not do too badly here, with the glaring performance hit being in gaming.
For most other multimedia applications the MA78GM should do quite nicely.
For movies and TV the results were very interesting, running 32bit applications for playback caused the system to have some major issues and resulted in the score dropping over 100 points.
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32Bit |
64Bit |
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3DMark06:
3DMark06 is a synthetic test from Futuremark that is designed to test your system’s ability to run 3D games. Although this will soon be replaced by 3DMark Vantage it is still a good test to get a feel for how your system will perform.
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X64 |
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Hmm, something odd here… on the cover of the box there is a large sticker stating that the MA78GM was able to achieve a score of 1500, but try as I might I could not get over 1200. This might be due to different system setups, perhaps they used a VERY light version of XP but be that as it may there is very little hope of grabbing that 1500 point mark on the average system.
Divx Encoding:
Divx encoding is a good overall performance test as it uses just about every I/O subsystem. For my encoding tests I use AutoGK version 2.4.5 and encode a 1.5 hour sample movie (not copyright protected) on DVD and encode it directly to the OS hard drive at 100% quality.
| Vista x86 | 1:19:00 |
| Vista x64 | 1:16:58 |
Time is in Hours, Minutes, and Seconds
My encoding tests were about what I would have expected, with times averaging about 1 hour and 20 minutes. Not the fastest encoding platform but certainly not the slowest.
Super PI:
I have now switched to using HyperPi 0.99b for my SuperPi testing; this uses the XS Mod version of SuperPi to calculate the number PI out to a ridiculous number of decimal places ranging from a few thousand to 32 million. This test is also a great test to measure stability between the memory, HDD and CPU in multi-core systems. If you have any errors in that loop SuperPi will fail, if there are any bottle necks your times will reflect it.
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The times for SuperPi were about what you would expect, perhaps on the slow side but nothing major.
{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Gaming Performance:
HalfLife 2 Portal:
Valve’s Portal is an amazing game, not only for its great graphics and physics effects but for its tongue-in-cheek humor and great mini-story line. Valve has us craving more of GLaDOS and the portal gun. But is this a game you could play on the MA78GM?
We left everything set to default for our gaming test (as shown in the screen shots below) and ran through the first few levels to see how well it ran.
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Settings |
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On the whole Portal was fairly playable at these settings, I would not want to game like this for an extended period of time as the game seemed sluggish and not responsive. Additional tweaking of the settings did yield a more playable game but at a heavy cost in visual quality.
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Frames Per Second captured using FRAPS 9.2.4 (higher is better)
Bioshock:
Bioshock was my game of choice to see if the MA78GM could truly handle DX10 surfaces and textures. Set in an underwater utopia-gone-bad, Bioshock is reminiscent of some of Looking Glass Studios’ other titles such as SystemShock One and Two (“why are you running you worthless bag of meat and bones?”) Where the hero is constantly guided and antagonized by unseen voices as he moves through the landscape, you also have many options as how to build up your character by choosing different Plasmids (genetic altering material that “enhances” your abilities) to make your character more powerful.
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In all it is a very engaging and entertaining game. Again, as with Portal, I ran my testing at default settings, this included DX 10 Surfaces.
I have to say that testing Bioshock on this mainboard was one of the most tedious things I have done. While not exactly a slideshow the frame rates were so slow as to be maddening.
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Frames Per Second captured using FRAPS 9.2.4 (higher is better)
Turning off DX10 textures improved performance to slightly less than dreadful.
After tinkering around I was able to get a playable game but this came at the cost of all visual effects and about as boring a game as you can imagine.
Gaming performance conclusion:
Although I only tested two games I feel that if you are going to announce DX10 compatibility then your system should at least be able to handle it. Sadly the MA78GM was not able to. I am sure that there are games that will run quite well but these will be older games without the newer effects and textures. Perhaps if you add in a second GPU and take advantage of the hybrid graphic you could play these games but then you are may as well get a better board without the UMA GPU and buy the discrete card in the first place. To put it simply the MA78GM is not a gaming platform by itself and should not be marketed as one at all.
Video Playback Performance:
This was an easy one to test, all I had to do was hook up my HDTV using the HDMI port, plug in my BluRay drive and sit down with a couple of movies. Video playback was outstanding with no jumping frames no visible ghosting and no sound artifacts. Even watching Divx or Xvid files did not seem to affect video playback performance.
{mospagebreak title=Price\Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
Price:
You can find the GA-MA78GM-S2H for the low price of $99.00 at NewEgg and as high as $105 elsewhere on the Internet. This is a very good price considering the what you are actually getting with HDMI and HDCP support straight from the UMA GPU, good quality audio and Hybrid graphics support.
Warranty:
GIGABYTE offers a three year limited warranty on all of its mainboard products. RMA is setup through the GIGABYTE website.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The GA-MA78GM-S2H is a nice little mainboard if you are looking for a basic entry level system or a board for an HTPC. In both of these capacities it performs rather well.
Where things fall apart is in the realm of gaming. I cannot see how AMD could pronounce this to have DX10 support (other than the fact that you can turn these settings on) as the UMA GPU fails terribly when under the stress of DX10 surfaces and textures.
Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I cannot say enough for the rest of the board. For $100 you really are getting quite a lot. Especially if you package this up with one of the low cost tri-core CPUs that AMD has out, these two with some good cooling and a large HDD you have a great HTPC without spending a ton of cash.
If this is the direction you are going then you should definitely take a look at the GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H
Pros:
Hybrid Graphics support
HDMI out
BluRay Lossless Audio
Low cost
Great Video and Audio playback
Cons:
Horrible DX10 support
Poor gaming performance
Discuss this review here
Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank Angela Lan at GIGABYTE her help in arranging this review.