The forthcoming ATI mobo chipsets

[CityK]

Not a whole lot has been mentioned about the upcoming chipsets, yet official announcements are expected relatively soon (Q1 2003?). Anyone have any recent news on them?

Any predictions -> will they get it right?

Cheers, CK

 

[LiamC]

My guess is that it will be a lot like NVIDIA, second or third time right. While ATi's designers and engineers are talented, they haven't (AFAIK) done a core logic chipset before. I still think there is a bit of the "black arts" in chipset and CPU designs...

 

[CougTek]

Their current IGP3xx for notebook have better integrated graphics than all other (laptop-related) chipsets, but their overall performances are lower. ie - ATI did well on the graphic part but it's behind for the rest of the system optimization.

They made it clear earlier this Fall (maybe at Comdex) that they do not intend to compete against nVidia in term of performances (always talking about the chipsets). They target more the value market. Not to say that they won't offer socket-A solutions, just something for the Pentium 4 platform. IMO, this means they know their current chipset design isn't fast enough to compete against the bigger players so they only try to find an empty spot to place their offering.

Don't expect miracles out of ATI's chipsets.

 

[CityK]

Found this Inquirer article and it pretty much reiterates your comments. Reading between the lines, it would appear that ATI does have big plans in mind, but will initially take a modest approach - I suppose both to just get their feet wet and also to hone their black art skills - before they make a big forray.

I'm curious, and can't remember, how did Nvidia forcast or position the origianl Nforce chipset's performance before its release?

In terms of Socket A chipsets, SIS and Acer have seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Via just keeps on trudging along, but I think the NF2 has kind of given them a big kick in the pants and would expect they are going to react (sort of reminescent of the Athlon B's giving the sleeping giant Intel a wakeup call). Anyways, if AMD survives, the chipset landscape could be rather interesting in a year and a half or so.

Cheers, CK

 

[CougTek]

Via just keeps on trudging along, but I think the NF2 has kind of given them a big kick in the pants and would expect they are going to react

I think the Hyperion driver was the beginning of what you could call "a reaction". It gave a 5% boost in 3DMarks on the box on which I installed it. Almost enough to reach the performance level of an average nForce2 motherboard.

What I really like about the nForce2 chipset isn't just the superior results in benchmarks, but also the bunch of additional features it has, like 2 LAN controllers, an integrated Dolby Digital APU, etc. nVidia is forcing the others chipset makers to improve their products for the socket-A platform. And the nForce2 doesn't seem to have the same shameful PCI problems as VIA does (or did, no idea if it got better since the arrival of the VT8235 southbridge).

I'm eager to see if the upcoming KT400A will be able to defeat the dual-channel nForce2 chipset for the performance crown of the socket-A platform.

 

[CityK]

It gave a 5% boost in 3DMarks on the box on which I installed it. Almost enough to reach the performance level of an average nForce2 motherboard.

I haven't bothered trying them out myself, but I did note your post about that before (coupled with the ATI drivers).

What I really like about the nForce2 chipset isn't just the superior results in benchmarks, but also the bunch of additional features it has, like 2 LAN controllers, an integrated Dolby Digital APU, etc. nVidia is forcing the others chipset makers to improve their products for the socket-A platform.

Completely agree. Nothing like some healthy competition to raise the bar. One question about the Nforce2 though - despite the potential for all those great features, how many board producers are implementing all of them? From what I've seen (not looking too hard mind you) is that manufactures are somewhat skimping on this first round of NF2 releases.

the nForce2 doesn't seem to have the same shameful PCI problems as VIA does

I hope I am not misrepresenting anything here, but I belive George Breeze has been reporting that with the KT400 Via has pretty much resolved such PCI problems, and that the only real issue left is the need for all board producers to program/enable Bus parking in the BIOS.

I'm eager to see if the upcoming KT400A will be able to defeat the dual-channel nForce2 chipset for the performance crown of the socket-A platform.

I'm willing to bet that it will....however, I'm more interested as to what additional features Via is going to bring to the table with its next release.

Cheers, CK

 

[blakerwry]

As far as I know, only Asus has taken much advantage of the nForce2's awesome feature set.... but you are right.. it seems this 1st round is skimping and that mobo makers are waiting a bit to realease full-featured nForce2 products.

However, some of the features of the nForce2 will probably never be implemented in a mainstream board because of the impracticality of it... such as the 56k modem capabilities of the southbridge... The chipset might even support SDR RAM, however I doubt anybody is going to produce a dual SDR and DDR board based on the nForce2.

 

[CityK]

In my travels across the web today, I came across a review of the FIC AT31, which is based on ATI's IGP320 chipset. So, for those remotely interested, I thought I'd follow this thread up. In word: Pitiful. Being that, I'll link just to the conclusion. However, I warn you that even spending the few seconds reading it may be a collosal waste of your time.

http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/motherboard-reviews/1223_5.html

CK