Are ATI chipsets any good?

[PrayForDeath]

I only saw them on polls and such, I never seen an actual ATI based motherboard, are these real? Are they good? What do you know about them?

 

[joelslaw]

good ?'s They got me thinking. I found this:
http://techreport.com/reviews/...xpress200/index.x?pg=1
I haven't got to read it yet though, so I'm not sure how informative it is.

 

[CraigRT]

I've used an ATI powered mobo.. the Asus P4R800-VM... I hated the board personally... I cannot really pinpoint the problem, but it was just finnicky to installing drivers, and just didn't seem to be quite as responsive and smooth as any Intel or even SiS based rig. That was just my take though, I had the same overall feel with the Asus P4SP-MX which is not based on an ATi chipset, it was just not a nice board either.. the price reflects for them both which is the problem..

here is a link to the P4R800-VM
http://www.asus.com/prog/spec....P4R800-VM&langs=01

 

[grooge]

I have big hope in the radeon xpress 200 chipset for multimedia stuff. The integrated video could be used with an AGP card to drive 2 or more monitor and some manufacturer may include the rage theater 550 for capturing and other multimedia stuff.

 

[bob661]

Give it time to mature and it will probably be a decent chipset. Time will tell.

 

[Cawchy87]

Agreed. Remember the nforce 1?

 

[gobucks]

i think that ATI is proving that they CAN make decent chipsets, but i don't think the Xpress 200 is quite there yet. The basic design is fine, and there are some cool things, like good overclocking flexibility and a really neat option to use both integrated and descrete graphics for different displays, but they really are behind on all the extras. The lack of ANY cool new features, like integrated LAN, HD-Audio, SATA-II, NCQ, hardware firewall, standardized overclocking tools like ntune, is just not gonna cut it for DIYers looking for a solid platform. Sure, you can't put everything on a mobo and fit it into an ATX form factor, but you can't very well offer NOTHING other than cool integrated video and decent performance. That's why the board is being adopted by mobo makers mainly for low end/HTPC use. In fact, the only currently available one is a micro ATX MSI board, and it sucks. No LAN, no PCIe x1 slots, no overclocking options, no frills whatsoever, yet it costs like $180 right now, whereas i paid $119 for my Chaintech VNF4/Ultra mobo, which is ten times better in features.

Still, i think ATI has passed a big hurdle in bringing competitive performance and stability to the table. If they can just focus on a better feature set (after all, their competition, the nforce4, has everything and the kitchen sink), i think they can make some serious inroads into the mobo market. Till then, i wouldn't recommend the boards to anyone but OEMs or those looking for a cheap, low end PC or HTPC with PCIe graphics.