How Far Have AMD & Intel Integrated Graphics Come Since 2006?

Integrated Graphics Showdown!

Since Legit Reviews first came online nearly a decade ago the one phrase that we have heard consistently over the years is that integrated graphics suck and that you should never use them. Mainly the people saying this are gamers and we all know that having a discrete graphics card is the way to go. To set things straight, Intel and AMD have never positioned their integrated graphics solutions for high-end gaming, but could that be changing?

Over the past couple years we have seen AMD and Intel improve integrated graphics enough that the sub $99 graphics card market has started to dry up. The performance level isn’t there to kill off mainstream discrete graphics cards, but entry level discrete cards are going to have a tough time finding a place in the market.

For years both AMD and Intel have claimed to lead integrated graphics performance, but not too many enthusiast and gaming sites actually look at integrated graphics let alone look at the performance gains over many years of products. That gave us the idea to do just that and it would also give us some numbers to use again when AMD launches Trinity and Intel launches Ivy Bridge processors later in 2012.

We went out and rounded up five Intel and AMD boards and tried to get one from each of the past five years starting in 2006. This should help us get a feel for how integrated graphics performance has matured from 2006 till today.

Motherboard	Chipset	Release Date	Graphics	Clock Speed	CPU
Intel DG965SS	G965	Q3 2006	GMA X3000	667MHz	E7200
Intel DG35EC	G35	Q1 2008	GMA X3500	667MHz	E7200
Intel DG45ID	G45	Q3 2008	GMA X4500HD	800MHz	E7200
Gigabyte H55M	H55	Q4 2009	Intel HD	749MHz	Core i3-530
Intel DH67BL	H67	Q4 2010	Intel HD 3000	850MHz	Core i3-2105

As you can imagine trying to do a an article like this is a nightmare, but we managed to get five motherboards based on the right chipsets. Since these motherboards use three different CPU sockets we used the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz Processor on the LGA775 boards, the Intel Core i3-530 2.93GHz Processor on the Intel LGA1156 board and the Intel Core i3-2015 3.1GHz ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor on the LGA1155 board. We updated each boards BIOS to the latest version and ran either 4GB DDR2 CL5 or DDR3 CL9 memory on each of the respective boards.

Picking out five AMD motherboards was a little easier on us as we only needed two different processors. We went with the AMD Athlon II 3.0Ghz dual-core processor and the AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ 2.9GHz quad-core processor for testing.

Motherboard	Chipset	Release Date	Graphics	Clock Speed	CPU
Gigabyte MA69GMS2H	690G	Q1 2007	Radeon X1200	400MHz	Athlon II 250
MSI KA780VM	780V	Q2 2008	Radeon HD 3100	500MHz	Athlon II 250
MSI 785GM-E65	785G	Q3 2009	Radeon HD 4200	500MHz	Athlon II 250
MSI 890GXM-G65	890GX	Q2 2010	Radeon HD 4290	500MHz	Athlon II 250
Gigabyte A75-UD4H	A75	Q3 2011	Radeon HD 6550D	600MHz	A8-3850 APU

After getting all ten of the motherboards BIOS versions updated, we loaded up Windows 7 64-bit on OCZ Vertex 3 240GB solid-state drives and installed all the latest drivers for each platform. Now that all the systems are updated, we are finally ready to do some testing.

Actually, that makes it sound too easy. Two of the ten boards had capacitors that blew up, one of the boards BIOS got corrupted during updating and one board died. It took weeks to get 10 good boards in-house for testing that properly worked! Let’s take a look at the numbers to see how all these boards performed!