For the budget-minded consumer, the ECS GF8200A is a pretty good deal. For $70 USD, the board has the features to build a good gaming PC or a HTPC with the integrated graphics with the caveat that there is no digital audio output and DVI port. The benefit of having DirectX 10 integrated graphics include: PureVideo HD playback of Blu-Ray discs and the ability to use the Aero UI in Windows Vista. GeForce Boost is an interesting concept but with it working only on the 8400/8500 cards is limited in usefulness to most people as they might be better served buying a 9600GT and using the integrated graphics in an emergency. Hybrid SLI shows performance increases in most of the tests but in others it shows the same performance as the 8500GT by itself.
The interesting thing about the ECS GF8200A board is that it fully supports the new Phenom X4 9850 CPUs. It’s interesting because some AMD motherboards based upon the 780G chipsets have an issue with the 125W TDP so if you want to use integrated graphics with the newest AMD CPU you need to use a board like the GF8200A as it has a 4-phase design and is compatible with the 9850 with no issues. HybridPower on the other hand is a great concept. With the steady march to $5 a gallon of gas and rising electricity bills, the savings that turning off the discrete graphics card in this system are pretty clear as the GeForce GTX280 can consume 236W of power by itself. The ECS board is an interesting choice for the upgrade not wanting dual graphics cards as it has 5 expansion slots on an integrated board. Overall ECS has done a good job with their GF8200A board, with performance near the top of the AMD platform.
