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ATI Radeon Xpress 200

ATI has upped the ante at the motherboard chipset table with their latest offering. The list of features is long, but is the performance there?

RS480 Introduction:

While some of us might think that this is ATI’s first step into the motherboard chipset arena, that is far from the truth. ATI has been doing motherboard chipsets for years, just likely not ones that computer hardware enthusiasts would really want to own. But with the coming of the RS480 chipset series from ATI, all of that may be changing. This week we have seen the launch of the “Radeon Xpress 200 Series” chipsets. Confused that the “Radeon” moniker now adorns a motherboard? Yes, me too, but there is some logic to it. Although I am unsure if this will dilute the brand name or not, we can certainly discuss that later.

Radeon Xpress Features

In today’s market, features are just as important as performance and stability. Features are the backbone of marketing and selling a new product in our industry. Why buy brand X when brand Y has more cool stuff, right? With that said, take a look at what you will find on the RS480 chipset from ATI.

Does any of this look familiar to you? It should, as it represents just about the same thing that everyone else has. “Everyone else” being NVIDIA’s nForce4 and VIA's K8T800Pro. OK, but before you browse away, there are some things here worthy of you time. The really big thing about this board is that it gives us AMD Athlon 64 939-pin support along with support for PCI-Express graphics and X-1 interface products, SATA RAID, 1GHz HyperTransport bus, Dual Channel DDR400, multi-channel audio, and USB 2.0.

Radeon Xpress 200 Graphics

ATI is bringing to market their “200” model chipset with on-chip DirectX 9 graphics. This is a first of its kind, and it will also likely represent a huge marketing advantage. Does this really mean anything to gamers? Gamers will likely not give a second look to the Radeon Xpress 200 in terms of gaming. Its performance is going to be lacking that of a current Radeon X300, which is certainly low man on the totem pole. But if you really want to, you can play some games on the Radeon Xpress 200. Just keep in mind that none of the new games will be at high resolutions.

There is something here that even the gamers will need to remember, as many of those hardcore gamers also use their boxes for forms of entertainment other than video games. They record TV and movies. They rip DVDs and encode to DivX or use other codecs. While none of these have anything to do with gaming, many of today’s video solutions are utilizing the VPU’s power instead of your CPU, which leaves the CPU free to handle other functions that you might be running simultaneously. Actually, with some content we are seeing shader engines come into play when doing special clean up features for compressed video. Along with all of this, we will also likely be seeing retail motherboards that have the ATI Theater 550 Pro chipset on them as well. In tandem with the on-chip video abilities, the Theater 550 can deliver hardware MPEG-2 encoding so that using your system as a PVR does not take a ton of CPU power.

Unlike some other solutions that we have seen in the past, the Radeon Xpress 200 promises to allow us to use the on-chip graphics to power an additional screen as well as the primary one. So if you have a single head video card, with the 200 you could still run a dual monitor setup. And with a dual head card, you could run a triple monitor setup if you wanted. And take my word for it, once you go to a dual display, you will not want to go back.

So, all in all, even if you are a hardcore gamer, the on-chip Radeon Xpress 200 graphics technology might be something you want to keep in mind, as it could certainly have benefits other than gaming.

Radeon Xpress 200 Overclocking

As mentioned above, the past ATI chipsets have simply fallen short when it came to enthusiast features. That certainly does not seem to be the case with the Radeon Xpress 200 series. This RS480 BIOS has more switches and tweaks than you can shake a stick at. Also, the PCI bus, and every other bus on the board, runs asynchronously of the Front Side Bus. We are happy that it did not take ATI a year to bring that true enthusiast feature onboard like NVIDIA and VIA did.

Put that together with the fact that it looks like ATI has gotten their memory latency issues tidied up on the RS480, and you have an enthusiast platform. That is, of course, as long as you have one more thing, and that thing is FSB scaling. It looks as though the RS480 is going to be very capable in this area. While we were not able to get our sample this high, we did get reports of FSBs running stable from 270MHz to over 300MHz. This RS480 has been able to do something that the challenging nForce4 has not been able to accomplish, and that is healthy FSB overclocking while running SATA controllers. With NVIDIA’s SATA controllers utilized, you are hitting the edge of the OC envelope at 240MHz or so, and that does not seem to be the case with ATI’s reference board.

We have to say that this motherboard was very stable as well and worked better than many retail motherboards we have been blessed with over the years. Still, when it comes right down to it, this is a reference motherboard and it may or may not resemble anything that you and I will actually be able to purchase one day. We have had terrible reference boards here that have done great in retail form and vice versa. In fact, it makes me wonder why we bother with some of this stuff sometimes. If anything, we now know that ATI is able to produce an enthusiast level product. Now the trick will be to see if our friends in Taiwan and China can take the RS480 chipset and make it work well enough to impress you and me in retail motherboard form.