What difference in performance is made by chipset alone?

[Dankk]

I'll keep this short: I've been wondering if my AMD 785G motherboard is less than ideal for playing video games and doing other intensive tasks. I hear people talking about their gaming setups that have an 890FX for crossfire and whatnot, and I don't know if they have any huge improvements for single-card setups.

If I had chosen an 8xx series chipset motherboard instead of my current 785G, what kind of a performance gain would I see? This is assuming everything else is identical, including CPU/socket, PCI-E 2.0 GPU/slot, and memory. I heard that it's a good idea to use a motherboard with no integrated graphics to avoid offloading any power onto an unused video chip, or something like that, but again I'm not sure.

Specs are in my signature. Edit: It happens to be totally coincidental that both my desktop and laptop use the same chipset (I bought them at different times for different uses). Except with my laptop, I obviously have to use the onboard 4200.

 

[fffblackmage]

You can disable the IGP via BIOS if you don't need it.

For single gfx card setups, any difference in performance will be unnoticeable, if any. Those higher-end chipsets (790/890) are more ideal for xfire/sli setups because they have more PCIe lanes to enable two full speed x16 PCIe slots.

I'm not sure what improvements or features were added to the 800-series chipsets, but I doubt it's significant enough to make a noticeable difference in gaming performance.

 

[xd_1771]

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see much gain - even then it probably wouldn't be noticeable during normal use. The 890 chipsets have an improved Northbridge-southbridge link; I think that's about it.

 

[nenforcer]

Not a tremendous amount of difference of with a single video card but the 690FX, 790FX and 890FX are AMD's enthusiast Spider, Dragon and LEO platforms for a reason.

I think the main reason is that these chipsets provide enough PCI-Express lanes for true dual 16x Crossfire instead of 8x8.

I don't know if your 785G can or cannot run in full 16x16 Crossfire.

 

[StrangerGuy]

0 if you running a single card. CPU-memory traffic already bypasses the chipset and PCIE 16x 2.0 is overkill for a single GPU.

 

[animekenji]

I'm running an 880G motherboard and the onboard video doesn't seem to be a drag on my video card at all.

 

[Iron Woode]

I noticed a fair difference when I went from an Nvidia 570 chipset (MSI K9N Platinum) to an AMD 770 chipset (GA-MA770-UD3). The system components stayed the same, but performance was improved.