ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 Chipset Preview

Benchmarking

Due to testing time constraints (less than a week) and the fact that this is a pre-release reference board we ran only a limited number of benchmarks. We will have an additional follow up article in the area of overclocking, so be on the look out!

Individual Test Systems:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ — (VIA K8T890/nForce3 Ultra/RS480), 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston PC3200 HyperX @ DDR400 (2-2-2-5), ATI X800 XT 256mb (Catalyst 4.11), 120GB Seagate SATA150 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.
• Intel P4 560 — Intel D925X (Intel 925X), 1GB (2x512MB) Crucial PC4200 @ DDR2 533 (4-4-4-12), ATI X800 XT 256mb (Catalyst 4.11), 120GB Seagate SATA150 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Testing Procedure:

All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows XP Professional build 2600 with Service Pack 1A and DirectX 9.0b. All benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. No overclocking was done on the video card during any of this review. We did disable the Firewire, and LAN features if found in the BIOS menu for all the testing completed during this review.

FutureMark; Bapco SYSmark2004:

SYSmark2004 provides an application-based benchmark that accurately reflects usage patterns for business users in the areas of Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity.

Results: We don’t have the new nForce 4 Ultra on hand for testing, but it was obvious that the ATI XPRESS 200 chipset could hold its own against the recent VIA K8T890 reference board and the older nForce 3 Ultra chipset.

Gaming Benchmarks:

DOOM3:

FarCry 1.3

UT2004 w/ IGP Graphics Only:

3DMark 2005/ IGP Graphics Only:

Results: For a number of years now Intel has had some of the best integrated graphics and those consumers looking for decent graphics built into their chipset had to go with an Intel platform. Granted, the AMD Athlon 64 processors are currently the best gaming CPU’s available and it seems that ATI has a winning graphics solution! Our ATI XPRESS 200 chipset board with an A64 3800+ was able to more than double the results that we got on our Intel 915G platform with a 3.6GHz Intel 560 processor!