Date:
Friday , November 12, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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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?

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Test Setups

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Reference Motherboard (ATI RS480) - Athlon64 4000+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200XLPro DDR400 (2,2,2,5), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

MSI K8T NEO2 (VIA K8T800Pro) - Athlon64 4000+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200XLPro DDR400 (2,2,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

NVIDIA nForce 4 Reference Board (NVIDIA nForce 4) - Athlon64 4000+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200XLPro DDR400 (2,2,2,5), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Note: We are comparing equally clocked NV40 and NV45 video cards.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

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Keep in mind this is a synthetic benchmark so you are not seeing any real-world results, but SiSoft can still be a very handy tool. We use SiSoft memory benchmarks more to see if there is something "wrong." And as you can see in this case, there is nothing amiss.

Remembering that the Athlon 64 memory controller is on the CPU, we should really see no differences in properly optimized motherboards. In our slight scaling, the RS480 comes in right in the middle of the three chipsets. I would say that all three of our chipsets are doing what they should be doing in terms of moving data across the memory bus.