Final thoughts
ATI's first effort at an AMD Athlon 64 chipset with PCI-Express support has pretty successful in most respects. We already have a retail motherboard from MSI in for testing, and that's more than can be said for NVIDIA and VIA's Athlon 64-based PCIe core logics. What's also pleasing is just how stable and competent the reference Bullhead board was. ATI has also taken this opportunity to graft a full DX9-class integrated GPU that carries surprisingly good pixel and shading performance to boot. It's also unique in using an optional motherboard-mounted local framebuffer that's architected to alleviate the possible performance penalty imposed accessing main system memory.2D benchmark performance was at least equal to a well-tuned VIA K8T800's, and 3D results were generally competitive, save for an errant 3DMark2001SE showing. One possible area of concern in relation to the competition is how 'lite' the south bridge appears. ATI will no doubt contend that users are free to add in, hopefully via PCIe, whichever feature is lacking.
ATI's designed a multi-purpose chipset that will appeal to a wide range of users. On the one hand, the enthusiast has the choice of opting for a competitive chipset that appears to overclock as high as NVIDIA or VIA's best. The business customer, meanwhile, can take advantage of an IGP model and produce a low-cost, powerful system. Productivity may suffer once employees understand and exploit its DX9 goodness, though. What ATI and its partners need to do is flood the Athlon 64 market with as many different examples of its XPRESS 200 chipset, both basic and premium, before NVIDIA and VIA do. Timing is everything in this business, and the proverbial clock is ticking.
