X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 8)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/27/2006 | 02:34 PM ]

Disk Subsystem

The disk subsystem of the mainboard features six Serial ATA-II ports and two Parallel ATA-133 channels. Four of the SATA connectors and both the ATA connectors are provided by the ULi M1575 South Bridge. The remaining two Serial ATA-II ports are implemented via a very popular SiI3232 controller from Silicon Image. One of the ports can be found on the mainboard’s I/O panel as part of the SATA on the Go technology: the Silicon Image chip fully complies with the Serial ATA-II specification that describes hot connection of devices, so you can connect and disconnect an external hard drive to and from your computer without shutting it down. You only need to provide a power source for the drive. This external SATA port explains the odd location of the additional disk controller – it is on the left, next to the mainboard’s I/O connectors.

The Serial ATA-II controller integrated in the South Bridge can work in two modes: AHCI and Parallel ATA emulation. You don’t need to install additional drivers for the latter mode. The drives attached to the South Bridge via the Serial ATA interface can be united into RAID arrays of level 0, 1, 0+1, 5 or JBOD.

The additional Silicon Image controller supports RAID 0 and 1.

As we said above, the disk connectors are all placed in quite a convenient way, so you shouldn’t have troubles assembling the system.

Network and Audio, Peripheral Interfaces

The mainboard’s networking section is represented by two chips from Marvell Yukon, 88E001 and 88E8053. Both are single-die Gigabit Ethernet controllers, support the test-cable feature (AI NET2) and differ in the bus type – 32-bit PCI and PCI Express x1, respectively. Hardware security features like the Active Armor firewall from Nvidia are not supported. The networking capabilities of the ULi M1575 South Bridge – it features an integrated media access controller – are not implemented on the mainboard as the maximum speed it supports is only 100Mbps.

Unlike the nForce4 SLI X16, the CrossFire Xpress 3200 supports the High-Definition Audio standard. The audio section of the ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe is implemented with a HD codec Realtek ALC882 that supports the multiple streaming feature. The codec includes five dual-channel DACs and allows reproducing different audio content on a 7.1 speaker set and on a stereo system simultaneously. The maximum audio resolution supported is 24bit/192kHz for both the analog and S/PDIF outputs. The recording resolution is limited to 20 bits. A number of functions are supported to improve the microphone recording quality. The connectors this codec supports are all switchable and support the auto-detect device feature. The AAFP header near the chip is meant to connect to the front audio panel.

The chip specification declares a signal-to-noise ratio of 103dB for all the DACs and 90dB for the ADCs of the codec. Of course, these are theoretical numbers because the real parameters of the codec are going to be worsened by electromagnetic interference from the other mainboard components. Still, this should be enough for many users, while true audiophiles will surely buy a discrete audio card for their PCs.

The IEEE 1394a (FireWire) interface is provided by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB22A chip. Both the ports the chip supports are available as onboard connectors that are to be connected to the appropriate back-panel bracket. The USB 2.0 interface is implemented using the capabilities of the ULi M1575 South Bridge; eight ports in total are available (seven in the Wireless Edition of the mainboard).

The back panel of the mainboard is the same as the A8N32-SLI Deluxe’s: two PS/2 ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors, a Serial ATA-II connector (SATA on the Go), an LPT port, 6 audio sockets, two Ethernet ports with LED indicators, and four USB ports.