ATI and Pentium 4 - The Right Stuff?

Introduction

ATI is better known for its graphics cards than anything else. In fact, when most people are asked they think simply Radeon; most of us wouldn't even know of the IGP series of motherboard chipsets that ATI has managed to push out.

It's not all that new a concept. ATI has been producing IGP motherboard chipsets for a bit, the first was the IGP 7000 series that was integrated into Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 notebooks. This chipset supported SDRAM memory, 66/100MHz FSB and integrated an ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card with either 8,16 or 32MB of system memory. Though the 32MB was rare to come by, the 16MB version frequented the cheaper P2 and P3 laptops quite often. The reason this chipset never made it beyond the mobile market was simply that is was power optimized and not a great performer when compared to Intel and VIA desktop chipsets.

ATI, however, has taken its first experiences to heart and rather than simply trying a new market spin, have actually taken the chipset back to the design board and seen what can be done. This has now given us the ATI Radeon IGP9100Pro chipset. The design of the chipset hasn't changed as far as the features are concerned; the main area has come from the memory controller.

Now this is all well and good, but most of us don't want the SMA abilities of the chipset, and that extra video core takes up space, power and costs more because it has to be implemented. nVidia changed that with the nForce2 SPP processor, and now ATI has done it also with the RX330.

Today we take a look at two retail boards available on the market based on these new chipsets and see what has changed and what is new.