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Summary

This is a basic preview of this product intended for readers who just want the quick look at the new product.  If you are interested in the full review, with all the technical data and benchmarks that you are used to seeing on PC Perspective, please click on this link to get to that article.

Today ATI is announcing the release of their new AMD K8 chipset, the ATI Radeon XPRESS 200.  While not ATI's first venture into the world of chipsets by any stretch, it may come as a surprise to many of you that they are indeed a chipset vendor.  Their work has usually been reserved for the OEM and notebook markets, and the XPRESS 200 chipset is one of their first jumps into the world of the PC enthusiast. 

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The ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 chipset will come in two different flavors -- the 200P and the 200.  The 200P is the enthusiast-aimed chipset with overclocking features while the 200 will offer these same features with the addition of an integrated graphics core on the north bridge.  This graphics core is based around the X300 GPU from ATI's desktop line and thus offers some minimal gaming benefits, but hardcore gamers will want to choose something else.  You could either go for the XPRESS 200P chipset and a single discrete (external) graphics solution or couple the XPRESS 200 chipset with an additional graphics card for use of up to 4 monitors on the same machine at a rather low cost compared to other similar solutions. 

The ATI XPRESS 200 chipset (both of them) also offer other features that you would expect from a modern, DIY chipset.  AC"97 audio, IDE and SATA support as well as RAID 0 and 1 are included with the XPRESS 200.  There isn't any integrated Gigabit networking, but ATI feels that having the motherboard vendor choose this option gives the users more options at lower costs.  Also, as I mentioned above, the XPRESS 200 chipset is a PCI Express based chipset for the AMD 939- and 754-pin processors. 

Let's look at a few benchmarks comparing the competing AMD PCI Express based chipsets.

The performance of the ATI XPRESS 200 chipset is nearly as we'd expect, with the only anomoly coming with the disk usage in the Winstone benchmark, which pushes the results behind the other AMD results. 

If you would like a lot more information on the new features of the ATI XPRESS 200 and a lot more benchmarks comparing it to the competition, you'll definitely want to check out the detailed review of this product by clicking here or on the link below.

Click here for the Detailed Review