Introduction

For years the term “integrated graphics” has sent a cold shiver down the spine of many hardware enthusiasts, many of whom have been forced to rely on an integrated graphics solution at one point or another in their lifetime. In the past, integrated solutions have relied on anemic graphics cores with extremely limited, if any, 3D graphics capability. Lets just say that these integrated products from Intel, VIA, ALi, and SiS were hardly capable of providing an immersive gaming experience in contemporary gaming titles, much less a fluid, playable frame rate.

Overboard view

Angled view of the P4R800-V

The CPU socket

All that changed with the debut of NVIDIA’s nForce chipset. NVIDIA’s nForce IGP was the first integrated graphics solution to boast hardware transformation and lighting support, a key component of DirectX 7 and OpenGL titles such as Quake 3.Sure, its integrated GeForce2 MX graphics engine was a step behind the latest and greatest discrete PC graphics card on the desktop, but it was light years ahead of any other integrated graphics solution on the market. And of course, it also didn’t hurt that nForce also incorporated a high-end 5.1 audio solution that provided on-the-fly Dolby Digital encoding among its list of features.

Due to licensing restrictions, nForce was limited to just the AMD market. While NVIDIA was able to piggyback on Microsoft’s license agreement with Intel to provide the chipset for the Xbox, this did not carry over to the PC market, nor did NVIDIA want to pay for a Pentium 4 license to build chipsets for the P4 platform. ATI however (along with SiS) did have a Pentium 4 license, leading many to speculate that their Pentium 4 chipset was right around the corner.

Around the middle of 2002, ATI officially unveiled its RADEON IGP line. In a somewhat surprising development ATI announced IGP products for both Intel and AMD platforms. ATI’s IGP was based on its original RADEON graphics core making it a worthy competitor to Intel’s integrated solutions and would be taking on NVIDIA’s nForce head-on.

Lower half of the board

ATI's IXP150 Chip

2 SATA Raid connectors

As the months passed on, ATI’s RADEON IGP was hard to find. Ultimately, the RADEON IGP never found its way to the desktop on the Pentium 4 platform, although ATI picked up several design wins on the mobile front and FIC maintained a few lines of IGP-based motherboards for the AMD market. ATI didn’t make a huge splash on the market, but they did acquire one valuable resource that’s often overlooked: experience.

Now ATI is back with their newer, RADEON 9100 IGP first announced last summer. Unlike the original RADEON IGP, ATI’s 9100 IGP is based on their newer, RADEON 9000 graphics core, making it the first integrated graphics solution on the market to support 1.x pixel and vertex shaders first introduced with DirectX 8. This puts ATI one generation ahead of everyone else, including NVIDIA and Intel. Not only does ATI’s latest chipset add new features, they’ve also won over a larger variety of board partners. ASUS is one of the first motherboard manufacturers with a fully fledged ATX solution, the P4R800-V Deluxe. ASUS has a reputation for building some of the best motherboards in the business, so our expectations are high for the P4R800-V Deluxe.