X-bit labs

Roundup of 7 Contemporary Integrated Graphics Chipsets for Socket 478 and Socket A Platforms (page 2)

Category: Chipsets

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 07/05/2004 | 11:09 AM ]

Testing Participants

ATI RADEON 9100 IGP

The RADEON 9100 IGP is not the first attempt of ATI Technologies at developing integrated chipsets: the company has long been shipping such products. We may recall the 320/330/340 IGPs and the mobile 320M/340M IGPs. Still, it is the RADEON 9100 that achieved the highest popularity in the desktop chipset field.

This chipset (see our review of the RADEON 9100 IGP) supports Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors. It can clock the system bus at 400/533/800MHz frequencies and thus allows using all the modern CPUs from Intel. What’s most important for integrated graphics, the chipset has a dual-channel memory controller with support of the fastest modules (DDR266/333/400).

The integrated graphics core of the RADEON 9100 IGP, like in all modern integrated chipsets, doesn’t have dedicated graphics memory, but uses a portion of the system RAM. This organization is called Unified Memory Architecture – UMA.

The graphics core and the central processor have to share the memory bus bandwidth and this sharing inevitably leads to performance losses. On the one hand, graphics is poor due to the CPU’s loading the bus and on the other hand the load from the graphics core encumbers the central processor. In other words, if you give one chair to two persons, both would feel uncomfortable.

The dual-channel memory controller improves the situation considerably: using a twice-wider bus, the graphics core and the CPU impede each other less. By the way, the integrated chipsets from ATI Technologies allow us one experiment: we can evaluate the gains from a dual-channel memory controller without artificially lowering the performance by plugging memory into one bank only because the RADEON 9100 IGP has a single-channel analog, the RADEON 9000 Pro IGP, with the same graphics core inside.

Let’s get back to the 9100 IGP, though. The chipset came to us on a P4V800-V Deluxe mainboard from ASUS:

This is the only mainboard among the models included into our today’s tests that is made in the full-size ATX form-factor. The board features the RADEON 9100 IGP chipset with an IXP 150 South Bridge.

Slots and connectors:

• Socket 478 for Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron CPUs with 400/533/800MHz FSB;
• 4 slots (2x2 channels) for PC2100/2700/3200 DDR SDRAM;
• 1 AGP 4x/8x slot, 5 PCI slots, 1 Wi-Fi slot;
• 2 ATA 66/100 slots (IXP150);
• 1 ATA 66/100/133 slot + 2 SerialATA slots with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 (SiS 180);
• 1 IEEE1394 connector (VIA6307);
• 1 RJ-45 10/100/1000 Ethernet connector (Marvell 88E001);
• 3 audio connectors: Line-out, Line-in and Mic-in (ADI AD1888);
• 1 VGA connector, 1 S-Video connector, 1 RCA connector;
• 1 parallel and 1 serial port (on a bracket), 4+2 USB connectors.

The mainboard looks modern and highly functional; evidently, it should cost more than low-end products.

The integrated graphics core implemented in the RADEON 9100 IGP is a close analog of the desktop RADEON 9000/9200 chips. Thus, I can say that this chipset has the most advanced graphics core of all the integrated chipsets now widely available. Right now, ATI Technologies is the only supplier of DirectX 8.1-compliant integrated graphics.

You can learn more about the capabilities of the RADEON 9000/9200 GPU, and, accordingly, of the graphics core of the RADEON 9100 IGP chipset, in our review called ATI RADEON 9000 PRO: TYAN Tachyon G9000 Graphics Card Review; I will only quote the basic facts:

• 2 pixel pipelines with one texture-mapping unit per each;
• Hardware DirectX 8.1 shader support;
• Support of bi-linear, tri-linear and anisotropic (up to 16x) texture filtering;
• Rendering of up to 6 textures per pass;
• Full-screen antialiasing (2x-6x supersampling);
• Hardware motion compensation and iDCT for DVD playback;
• 10-bits-per-channel 300MHz RAMDAC.

So, here’s the first contender from ATI and ASUS: a dual-channel chipset with a powerful graphics core, excellent functionality, support of modern processors and fast memory.