ATI Radeon Xpress 200: Performance, PCI Express & DX9 for Athlon 64
by Wesley Fink on November 8, 2004 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Integrated Graphics Performance: Conclusion
When the nForce2 was released, its integrated graphics could outperform the slowest GeForce4 MX 420, but not much more than that. With the move to full floating point DX9 architecture, die space, heat and transistor count are much more valid concerns, and it would seem that the days of just integrating a company's entry level GPU are over.The Radeon Xpress 200 does one very important thing better than Intel's integrated graphics - compatibility. Since the underlying architecture is based off of the X300, game compatibility isn't much of an issue.
The performance of the Radeon Xpress 200 is better than the integrated graphics of Intel's 915G, but it's not the type of demolishing performance we would expect from a chipset produced by one of the top two GPU manufacturers. Then again, performance isn't what sells in this market, after all, despite how bad Intel's integrated graphics performs it still sells incredibly well. We would have liked to see better performance out of the Radeon Xpress 200, at least X300 SE levels but with only two rendering pipelines it's tough to do. We understand the tradeoff ATI had to make, we just wish it didn't have to be this way. We'd take the Radeon Xpress 200 over Intel's integrated solution any day, but we can always want more. Rumor has it that ATI's Intel chipset will feature an updated graphics core, so we may just get our wish sooner than expected.
SurroundView however does make up for things, enabling excellent multimonitor support for between 2 and 4 displays - something no other platform can currently promise. In our opinion, if you've got the monitors, SurroundView itself is worth the price premium of the Radeon Xpress 200 over the discrete-only 200P. For us, more desktop space is always a plus and with three monitors it's something that's quite attainable.
Integrated Graphics Performance Comparison (continued)
SurroundView: Enabling More than Two Displays
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flatblastard - Saturday, April 9, 2005 - link
Hmmmm, still no real availability even now...Looks like MSI may be our only chance at this chipset....what as bummer :(philpoe - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
Hmmm, after no real availability (in the US at least) as of Friday 2/18/05, there's suddenly a slew of shops selling the MSI board on pricewatch, including Newegg. Anyone know of a reason why the boards are so slow to trickle out?philpoe - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
Is it possible to purchase these reference boards? I seem to see them in retail-looking packages in reviews from Canada.If you can get your hands on one, are the BIOSes available to the public, or only to the select HW review sites?
Wesley Fink - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
PERFORMANCE WITH 4 DIMMS CORRECTED>We have added the following update to p.6:
"UPDATE 11/11/2004: ATI has provided an updated BIOS which corrects the issues of 333 timings with 4 double-sided dimms. With the new BIOS we were able to run 4X512MB DS OCZ 3200 Platinum Rev.2 at 2-2-2-10 timings at DDR400 with a 2T Command Rate. This performance matches the best we have seen with 4 DS dimms on an Athlon 64 motherboard."
Momental - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
#35: I'm right there with ya, bud. Just when I "think" I've made up my mind to do the complete overhaul, the next exit appears on the highway taking me that much closer to the "Best Soft Serve in Town"!!The ol' gut tells me to hold out until some time just after the ball drops in Times Square and we'll all be in Fat City, so to speak. ;)
callius - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Somewhat OT maybe:anyone seeing a reason that the next rev of A64 supporting SSE3 (in market Q1/05) coul not be plugged in a 939-mobo (nvid, ati or via) without problems (except any necessary BIOS update) ?
callius - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Only minus vs nforce4 is that the SB does not support SATA-II's NCQ (for Seagate's upcoming 7200.8 series). Maybe with next SB in Q1/05 though ???mlittl3 - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Completely off topic, but does anyone know why there are four chipsets (two actively cooled, one passively cooled and the other with no cooling) in the SLI Tyan motherboard that #33 gave a link for?xeper - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
i can't seem to find ANY mention whatsoever of shared memory allocation. can someone help me out here?nserra - Tuesday, November 9, 2004 - link
Isn’t this very funny, I mean Ati was a very close partner to Intel, and they now bring to intel its one competition product but for the intel competitor.I see now no reason for Dell or other companies go for intel, because really intel had (has) the edge with integrated solutions.
A "part" I thought that there weren’t AMD IGP chipsets because it wasn’t possible to use the integrated memory controller for graphics, at least until AMD64 rev E0 came out?
If ati is going amd on pcie first, these shows that amd have the best processor and will continue for the time been. Even dothan can do much to turn it around again to intel side. And i bet that new p4 2mb is still with problems (performance, heat, …) and every one is running away from intel because already know this even intel, bringing dothan to the desktop market.