Ati radeon Xpress 200 Series Review

Back when Socket A was in its prime the chipsets to have on your motherboard were the Nforce and later Nforce 2. At the time they offered more features and better performance than anything the likes of Via could offer for AMD Athlon CPU’s, technology such as Soundstorm audio and Dual Channel memory. When the Athlon64 was released VIA and Nvidia released their next generation chipsets on Socket 940 and 754, surprisingly the new Nforce didn’t include Soundstorm (which was previously a huge selling point) and with Via’s addition of Dual Channel memory both chipsets became quite similar feature wise. Add to this that the Via boards were performing as well, if not better than any Nforce 3 board and you had an excellent group of boards to look at when deciding on a purchase. The best board in the 940 area was easily the ASUS SK8V, it was flawless and it was based around Via’s Chipset. Moving to Socket 939 there was a refresh of Nvidia’s Nforce 3 however even with this refresh which included onboard firewall there wasn’t anything that the average user would jump at to have over the usually cheaper Via based boards and for the second motherboard cycle there was no clear leader in the AMD Chipset market. Probably the 2 best, and most popular boards were again Via based in the form of the Abit A8V, Asus AV8 and MSI K8T NEO2-FIR. This performance and stability was further confirmed by AMD using Via based boards in its review kits for journalists.

So with everything pretty much the same in the AMD chipset world today see’s it become much more interesting with the launch of ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200 series chipset. ATI have been building a great reputation on the Intel Chipset front over the last 3 years and on that platform have arguably the best chipsets with features like onboard graphics being far ahead of the competitor’s solution. The new Radeon Xpress chipset however is designed for AMD socket 754 and 939.

So what’s in the Xpress?

The Radeon Xpress 200 Series comes in 2 varieties, the 200 and 200P. The Onboard graphics chipset is based on the Radeon X300 core and is therefore fully DirectX 9 compliant, it also runs across the PCI-Express interface. Other features of the chipset are Dual Channel memory, 4x1 PCI-Express lanes, 1x16 PCI-Express lane, SATA with Raid 0,1, PCI (our reference board has 2 PCI slots), 8xUSB 2.0, Firewire, AC97 Audio (5.1), Gigabit LAN (over PCI Express) and Hypermemory.Looking at that list of features and the one that’s immediately worth talking about is the onboard graphics. As mentioned previously it’s based on the X300, pipeline configuration and is as follows 2 pixel pipelines with 1 texture unit and 4 vertex units per pipeline. Interestingly, the Vertex Shader performance is assisted by the CPU so the faster the CPU you have the better your onboard graphics will perform. With the onboard graphics there is also one very surprising, but excellent, feature. The board has onboard DVI in addition to VGA. So not only can you have dual display through the Radeon Xpress you can have one of these running to your DVI compatible display. As with some of the Intel based ATI chipsets you can also combine the onboard graphics with a standalone ATI graphics card to further increase your displays to 3 or more.

As the onboard graphics are X300 based you gain full Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0 support with the motherboard, along with all the other DirectX 9 features. We’ll take a look later in the article at how the board performs graphics wise on the Source (Half-Life 2 engine) to see how well the graphics solution holds up to more demanding DirectX 9 applications. Hypermemory support for the graphics chipset allows the chipset to run in either Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) mode or with dedicated frame buffer memory to enhance the graphics performance. Finally, the onboard graphics will be fully compatible with ATI’s Catalyst Drivers.Moving on from the onboard graphics one of the other stand out features is gigabyte LAN over PCI express. The onboard solution can be either Broadcom or Marvel and as it runs over PCI express you can gain bandwidths of up to 500mb per second (bi directional) bandwidth per device. Whilst this isn’t the most important feature for the home user it certainly means your not going to run out of bandwidth any time soon.