In brief: ATI IXP400 supports more Parallel ATA devices but Intel chipsets offer more RAID modes (the i945), sterling SATA - not the almost useless 300 MB/s transfer rate in the i945, but AHCI functions providing real boost for SATA hard disks (in both Intel chipsets), and HDA support (also in both chipsets). It's harder to compare south bridges, as the ATI product can use ULi M1573 (or any future bridge from one of these companies), so that the lack of High Definition Audio is no longer a disadvantage of Xpress 200 IE. It also has an advantage over the i945 consisting in its support for both memory standards (and the fastest DDR2). Thus, comparing the comparable, the ATI chipset under review is inferior to the i945 in terms of Pentium D support, but it theoretically outperforms the i915/945 as far as PCI Express peripheral slots are concerned (that's because they are connected to the northbridge instead of the southbridge). (At the same time, i915-based products got cheaper.) There are practically no other modern (supporting PCI Express) solutions for the Socket 775 platform: VIA/SiS/ULi chipsets are scarcely represented in our stores and motherboards based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI IE (as well as Intel 925/955) are too expensive and don't have integrated video, that is they cannot compete with Xpress 200 IE directly. There start to appear motherboards on the improved i945/955 version already on a mass scale, their most important advantage being probably the support for dual core processors from Intel.
#Ati radeon xpress 200 chipset driver series
Indeed, we have never seen a production-line motherboard based on ATI Xpress 200, which would support this technology. There is also one little difference in the integrated video core - no HyperMemory support. Memory controller is now integrated into the chipset. It goes without saying that the interface connecting the chipset with a processor is the proprietary Intel QPB bus. Read about the ATI Xpress 200, because the functionality of the chipset for Intel differs only insignificantly.
And Intel has been developing muscles in this very area of late. The reason for this comparison is obvious, as integrated video is a trump card (perhaps even the strongest aspect) of ATI products. That's why we decided that this article should contain the Xpress 200 IE review and a roundup of all modern integrated chipsets for Pentium 4. It differs little from its counterpart for AMD64. The new chipset looks rather mediocre as far as its functionality is concerned compared to representatives of the Intel platform. Let's abbreviate it to Xpress 200 IE (on the analogy of the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI IE).
#Ati radeon xpress 200 chipset driver full
But it's very inconvenient to speak of a product and to spell out its full name, as if enumerating all the titles of an emperor. Perhaps, such a nomenclature looks logical.
Unfortunately, like NVIDIA a tad earlier, the Canadian manufacturer decided to keep the name of the chipset, having just added "for Intel processors". Almost six months after the release of the very interesting (and even unique in some respect) Xpress 200 chipset for AMD64 processors, ATI has presented a product with similar characteristics for Intel processors.