ED#79 : Intel G45 & G43 Chipset Details

Rumours have been going around about the new Intel G45 Express (Eaglelake-G) and G43 Express desktop chipsets that come with integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator. Well, there's no need to wonder any longer. We have proof that Intel will be releasing the two chipsets in Q2, 2008. The exact date is still up in the air, but we heard that it would be sometime in April 2008.

Here's the latest Intel desktop chipset roadmap showing the G45 and G43 chipsets.

As you can see, the G43 is a new TTM (time-to-market) SKU for cost-effective Vista Premium logo certification. In other words, the G43 was a quickly rustled-up model to provide Vista Premium logo certification at a lower cost.

What's the difference between the two? Let's take a look... Intel has kindly provided the following two tables to differentiate the lower-cost G43 from the G45.

Both the G45 and G43 chipsets are very similar. Both have integrated Intel graphics circuitry that support DirectX 10 and qualify for the Windows Vista Premium logo program. In fact, you can think of the G43 as a slightly crippled version of the G45.

What the G43 lacks are hardware acceleration for the decoding of VC1 and AVC HD video streams and support for more than 2 DIMMs. In other words, those using the G43 will have to rely on either the CPU or the graphics card (should it support hardware acceleration of HD decoding) to decode VC1 and AVC video content.

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