AMD motherboard chipsets

[kempodragon]

I am thinking of building an AMD based system and would like to know how the motherboards with AMD chipsets compare with Intel motherboard chipsets. I've seen plenty of reviews comparing the performance of the AMD and Intel processors, but no real comparison between motherboards. All my previous systems have been Intel processors and Intel chipsets. How well do the AMD chipsets perform?

[Blue_MiSfit]

The AMD chipsets perform quite well, in most cases. Their I/O is a bit slow compared to Intel / nVidia - particularly in USB 2.0 and FireWire. In practice, this shouldn't be a huge issue to most folks.

Also, AMD's integrated graphics are marvelous. The 780G has the Radeon HD 3200, which is basically a Radeon 2400. It has full HD decoding support, and integrated HDMI on most motherboards. It's also quite powerful compared to other IGPs in gaming. For reference, my WoW box has a 780g motherboard with integrated graphics, and it does fine at 1680x1050 with mostly low details. No other IGP can come close to that level of performance.

~MiSfit

[kempodragon]

Thanks for your input. In terms of I/O, is the performance throughput within a few percentage points of Intel? I think the site that listed x264 encoding with different processors also had the motherboards, but there was so much variation of setups that it was hard to parse the affect motherboards and processor combo had compared to each other.

[Blue_MiSfit]

It may be more than that, but I/O is rarely the bottleneck when it comes to video encoding (at the consumer level anyway). You will see slower copy times from drive to drive, if one of them is USB.

Take all that with a grain of salt. It's still a fast platform :)

~MiSfit

[kempodragon]

The reason I'm interested in I/O throughput is because I do video capturing of TV which does need as little bottlenecking as possible. My video card in my main system finally died, and since my main is so old, I decided to scrap it and build a new one from scratch. My laptop is an AMD Turion x64 dual core and it's performance overall has convinced me to take a hard look at building an AMD system. This new system will be a quad core and I'm trying to match components for overall optimization.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Do you capture to USB external hard drives?

~miSfit

[kempodragon]

I capped to an internal drive on a separate ATA controller card. Your comment about the USB throughput along with the thread on portable hard drives makes me wonder how playing games from my system drive mounted in an external enclosure and connected by USB 2.0 to my laptop will turn out. My laptop doesn't have any video inputs, so I'm OOL for doing any vidcapping until I build a new system.