Review: ATI XPRESS 200

by Tarinder Sandhu on 17 November 2004, 00:00

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa4s

Add to My Vault: x

Bandwidth, latency, Pifast, Lame

Kicking it off with a look at bandwidth and latency.



There shouldn't be too much to choose between chipsets designed for Athlon 64 CPUs for the simple reason that optimisations, usually carried out via a tweaked memory controller, aren't possible here.



Latency is also predictably fantastic. Note that the XPRESS 200's scores are the result of running a discrete GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCIe graphics card. Bandwidth and latency would be a touch higher if run with the IGP in non-embedded mode.



ATI's chipset shows considerable performance promise by turning in the fastest Athlon 3800-based time we've seen thus far. The difference between it and a VIA K8T800 Pro board is negligible. Both AMD setups spank Intel's 3.8GHz 570J just where it hurts.



There's literally no performance difference in Realstorm's Raytracing benchmark.