Nvidia GeForce 8200/8300 mGPU
First of all, we need to address some confusion around the products GeForce 8200 and GeForce 8300, as there is no way to find out their differences on the Nvidia website. The GeForce 8300 probably was a reaction to AMD’s graphics performance with the 780G chipset, as the 8200 and 8300 are identical except for the clock speed of their 16 stream processors: the GeForce 8200 runs at 1.2 GHz, while the GeForce 8300 is clocked at a 1.5 GHz speed, providing improved 3D graphics performance.
Nvidia decided to emphasize the GeForce part of this integrated chipset, by dropping the nForce name. That’s also why Nvidia refers to it as the GeForce 8200/8300 mGPU – this stands for Motherboard GPU. The model number indicates a perfect fit into the GeForce 8 family, signifying that GeForce 8200 is actually the entry-level part.
Big Chip Beats Two-Way AMD Design
Unlike the AMD 780G chipset, the GeForce 8200/8300 mGPU is a single-chip solution, which isn’t even built on a top-notch manufacturing process. Nvidia utilizes an 80 nm process, which is good enough to hold all the chipset features, PCI Express 2.0 connectivity, SATA controller with legacy UltraATA, 12 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet controller. Even with all that, the solution is still slightly more efficient than the 780G, requiring a system idle power of 58 W versus AMD’s 60 W using a Phenom X4 9600 processor.
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I'm confused by the Blue-ray FullHD Video Playback CPU Peak processor load figures. I have seen figures as low as 1-2% CPU usage on a 780G system with a much less powerful processor (Althon 4850). My guess would be that the test's H.264 decodeing was being done on the Phenom, not using Avivo HD or Purevideo HD. If so this is a very misleading test.
About that other post. H.264 is entirely decoded by the GPU, while Blue-ray has to be first decrypted by the CPU
The test showed a 4 core processor using 33% of CPU, I would not expect decryption to be anywhere near this expensive. On the other hand 33% CPU sounds like a plausible figure for software decoding of H.264 (or maybe VC-1).
I'm not claiming to be an expert but my personal experience is that hardware decoding took some effort to get working, thus given the figures I am suspicious of this test.