Introduction
Back in mid-November, we took our first look at the reference part for ATI's entry into the market for PCI Express Athlon 64 boards, in the form of their Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. The reference design gave us a stable platform that didn't shirk its duties on the performance front, as well as offering as close to a cutting-edge integrated GPU as you can find, offering DirectX 9 functionality with shading performance that wasn't to be sniffed at given its on-board nature.Of course what you, the users, really want to see is final, shipping, boards based around this RX480 chipset, and January 2005 looks set to be the time when this will come to pass. As a result, we are now seeing engineering sample boards from certain manufacturers, and today we will be looking at one such board - EQS' A58XK9-ALF motherboard. This particular board makes use of the Radeon Xpress 200P chipset, meaning that it is sans the integrated video functionality of the standard Xpress 200 variant, but otherwise contains all of the features seen in the reference design.