Synthetic Performance


This is where the Gigabyte GC230D was expected to fall over as 3D applications are not a strength of the Intel integrated graphics. According to 3Dmark06 the ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics engine is almost 16 times faster, which is shocking. That said, Intel has never been known for producing quality integrated graphics solutions, so a three year old engine never had a chance against AMD's latest offering.

Still, those looking at purchasing the Gigabyte GC230D, or any existing Atom desktop platform for that matter, should find these results useful. It would be unwise to expect a modern day level of integrated graphics performance out of an Atom desktop board, as it is never going to happen with the 945GC chipset.


The PCmark Vantage results are not nearly as disappointing considering these are far less GPU oriented. Here the Gigabyte GC230D delivers a little under half the performance of the Phenom X4 system, which is impressive.


The CINEBENCH R10 results look good, at least the single threaded part. The Atom 230 is a single core processor, so that makes sense. However the CPU also features Hyper-Threading and thus could run the multi-threaded test, but the results evidently are not quite like having two dedicated cores.

The Phenom X4 9350e is clocked 25% higher, also has a 512KB L2 cache but gets further support from 2MB L3 cache as well as significantly higher clocked FSB and memory.