Features (cont’d)

ATI provides a couple of different options for motherboard manufacturers with RADEON XPRESS 200. The chipset is also compatible with a similar offering from ALi. ATI has worked with ALi in the past, so the relationship is nothing new, but expect the two companies to be less dependant on each other in the near future, as ATI ramps up the capabilities of their South Bridge chips, an area they’ve been traditionally weak in.

Storage and audio

The South Bridge supports up to four Serial ATA drives with RAID Levels 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring) for added flexibility. In case you haven’t made the move to PCI Express just yet, the chipset also provides support for traditional parallel ATA drives (up to four can be used). Unlike NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset, RADEON XPRESS doesn’t support cross-controller RAID operation, all drives in your RAID array must be Serial ATA drives. Native Command Queuing also isn’t supported, nor is 300MB/sec Serial ATA.

Interestingly enough, the South Bridge is linked to the North Bridge by PCI Express, providing a 1GBps link between the two chips, with the South Bridge also supporting five traditional PCI slots for existing devices you may be using on your PC today. ATI’s reference ATX motherboard shipped with three x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI slots for example.

On the audio side ATI relies on traditional AC’97 audio, just like NVIDIA. Motherboard manufacturers have been quick to pick up the latest eight channel CODECs from Realtek and C-Media, but keep in mind that these are software-based solutions that will eat up CPU cycles for 3D positional audio functionality. ATI used Realtek’s popular ALC655 AC’97 CODEC on their reference RADEON XPRESS 200 motherboard.

Networking

For networking duties, ATI is relying entirely on external, dedicated PCI-based or PCI-E based solutions for networking functionality. ATI feels that the performance of PCI Express-based GigE solutions in particular can meet or possibly even exceed the performance of native solutions such as those used by Intel and NVIDIA. By going the external route, ATI also argues that motherboard manufacturers have the freedom to choose whichever provider(s) they’d like, potentially resulting in a cost savings for manufacturers.

Considering the needs of most potential RADEON XPRESS 200 users in the retail landscape, this probably isn’t a huge issue, after all GigE is overkill for many of you anyway, but potential corporate clients may be swayed by NVIDIA’s native Firewall solution. Another area where ATI’s South Bridge falls a little short of NVIDIA’s is USB support – the RADEON XPRESS 200 is limited to just eight USB ports maximum, while nForce4 is the first chipset on the market to support up to ten ports. ATI also expects some manufacturers to pair the RADEON XPRESS chipset with their THEATER 550 multimedia chip, this setup would make for a pretty compelling media center box. Unfortunately, nothing has been officially announced in this regard just yet though.