14 DAY TRIAL // Biostar has unveiled world's first GeForce 8200-powered motherboard. The company moved quickly, and maybe quicker than Nvidia would have expected. The GF8200 M2+ is the first Hybrid SLI-supporting motherboard that comes with integrated graphics onboard.
The manufacturer may have announced the motherboard, but this is a paper launch only, since Nvidia has not unveiled its MCP78 series of chipsets, so there will be a long way until the motherboard makes it to the retailers' shelves.
The motherboard is built on a micro-ATX form factor and supports all of AMD's AM2 and AM2+ processors. The GF8200 M2+ is based on the DirectX 10-supporting GeForce 8200 with integrated graphics processors, which allows low-end users to enjoy a decent gaming performance at reduced costs by merely stuffing a discrete graphics card to fuel the graphics computing needs.
The Hybrid-SLI technology will allow the integrated graphics to team up with a discrete card through the GeForce Boost technology. The chipset is also capable of switching to the new HybridPower mode, that will disable the extra GPUs, thus sparing energy when the system is throttled down.
The integrated graphics chipset features a 300MHz RAMDAC, and this might come as a big minus, since the nowadays graphics cards come with at least 400MHz. On the other side, the GeForce 8200 is limited in resolution anyway (1,920x1,200 pixels) and that is supposed to fix the issue.
The chipset also offers the user the PureVideo HD experience and supports four DDR2-1066 memory slots, a single PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot, six SATA-II connectors that can provide data transfer rates of 3.0 Gbps, 4 USB 2.0 port, one Gigabit Ethernet adapter and 6-channel audio. The SATA interfaces allow multiple RAID configurations, including RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 0+1.
There is no word on pricing or availability yet, but since the 8200 chipset is aimed at low-budget users, price should not be a problem. Still waiting for those fixed B3 Phenom processors? Now you've got an extra reason to do so.