Giga-Byte G-MAX TA4 Mini PC Review - Video Benchmarks

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As I said before, this board uses the Intel 845 chipset, one of the chips with the older Intel Extreme Graphics core. As described in the Intel website:

“The Extreme Graphics core supports the latest 2D and 3D APIs, delivering real-life environment and character effects. A 256-bit internal path enables up to four textures per pixel on a single pass for super light maps, atmospheric effects, and more realistic surface details. Flexible display capabilities enhance the personal computing experience, offering significant benefits for applications requiring 32bpp and higher display resolution.” 

The description sets a rather high standard for the chip. But how well does this board live up to that? To measure this, I ran FutureMark’s 3DMark2001SE, as well as the [H]ardOCP Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark. I attempted to run the Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XI benchmark, but simply got an error message. I guess I won’t be playing FFXI. More importantly, it tells me that I can’t run DirectX 9.0 with this system, at least not DirecX 9.0 supported calls. Now, the key here is to remember that this is on-board graphic we’re talking about. But, that can be good too, right?

3DMark2001 SE

As I mentioned before, the 3DMark test results say what I’ve already touched on: this is not a gaming system. In fact, it’s not even DirectX 8 compliant, as shown by its inability to complete the Nature test or shader tests. (In fact, this chipset is only compliant up to DirectX 7.)I’d go ahead and link to other scores for comparison, but to be blatantly honest, a score of 1422 is somewhere between miserable and pathetic – but expected for this configuration. It’s actually a bit higher that I expected, which can be attributed to the sheer processing power available in this thing.

Unreal Tournament 2003

As this chart shows, the game became essentially un-playable at any resolution higher than 640x480. Even then, I experienced a couple of DirectX errors due to the system’s inability to deal with certain necessary calls. Although older games, such as Quake III and American McGee’s Alice would run fine in this system with an 800x600 resolution, the simple truth is that if you’re looking for any sort of intensive gaming action, this is not the machine to do it with.

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