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
About 6 months ago, we reported that ATI would be introducing their first chipset for AMD Athlon 64. Between that first report and today's introduction of the ATI RX480 chipset, a lot has happened. In round 2 of the A64 chipset wars, the industry moved from the single-channel memory Socket 754 to the dual-channel Socket 939. VIA morphed their successful K8T800 chipset into the K8T800 PRO by adding 1000 Hyper Transport and a PCI/AGP lock. nVidia performed a more massive transformation of their nForce3 chipset, moving from the pedestrian nForce3-150 to the leading-edge nForce3-250 family in May. Clearly, the stakes for a new player in the Athlon 64 chipset market went up as Athlon 64 chipsets evolved.
Fast forward just five months and round 3 begins. nVidia and VIA both introduce PCI Express graphics into the Athlon 64 equation. However, the pioneer for discrete PCI Express graphics has been ATI, so it should come as no surprise that ATI is choosing round 3 to launch their first chipset for the AMD Athlon 64 - the RX480 discrete graphics chipset and the sister RS480 with integrated graphics.
In the larger marketplace, ATI has timed this introduction perfectly. Athlon 64 is now the undisputed performance king among processors, and the retail market share has been growing rapidly for the Athlon 64 processors. Looking ahead, the next year is likely to continue to be a great climate for Athlon 64 processors as Intel regroups for their next CPU introductions. AMD is in the process of successfully moving production to 90nm, which will likely allow even further extension of their performance lead. AMD also seems to have avoided the power and heat problems that have plagued Intel's move of the Pentium 4 to 90nm. Microsoft should finally launch the long-awaited 64-bit version of Windows, which will make Athlon 64 ever more attractive.
All of these market developments are good news for the ATI introduction of their first Athlon 64 chipset - if the RX480 can compete effectively with nForce4 and the "as yet unseen" retail K8T890. If the RX480 is competitive or even better than competitive, the introduction of RX480 could be the most significant event of round 3.
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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.