X-bit labs

Chipsets for Socket AM2 Platform: ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 and Nvidia nForce 590 SLI (page 2)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/13/2006 | 10:44 AM ]

Continuing our discussion of the chipset solutions for the Athlon 64 processors, we can state that the leader here remains Nvidia Corporation that has easily ousted its competitors from the arena during the transition from K7 to K8 micro-architecture.

Another player in the chipset market that managed to occupy quite a bit of a share there is ATI, which started aggressive marketing promotion of its core logic sets not so long ago. Even though the ATI solutions for hardware enthusiasts appeared a short while back, we have every right to state that they make the main alternative to Nvidia’s nForce these days.

There is one more reason explaining the success of GPU developers in the Athlon 64 chipset market, which is so beloved by extreme gamers and overclockers. The introduction of SLI and CrossFire technologies that allows combining a few graphics accelerators into a single high-performance graphics subsystem also played a significant role in ATI’s and Nvidia’s success in the system chipset market. The selectiveness of the ATI and CrossFire configurations in terms of the chipset used as a basis for the system mainboard limits the available chipset choices for the user. In other words, since a pair of Nvidia graphics cards can only work in SLI mode in an nForce based mainboard, as well as a pair of ATI graphics cards can only work in CrossFire mode in an ATI chipset based mainboard, no discussion of better alternatives is even possible.

Therefore, the user’s graphics preferences are the major factors that determine the chipset choice for the Athlon 64 system mainboard today (if the user intends to enable multi-GPU graphics solutions, of course). Otherwise, the choice of the Athlon 64 mainboard chipset doesn’t really matter, because the chipset will hardly affect the mainboard performance, stability and overall impression it makes. But what does matter, it is the mainboard designers and their level of expertise.

In fact, this is where we could actually end our story, because we have just drawn all the logical conclusions about the chipset choice for the Athlon 64 platform. However, we dare continue our study in order to find out what solutions ATI and Nvidia offer these days for the new Socket AM2 platform. We will discuss the main features of the new solutions and will try to put together a list of recommendations for those users who disagree with us and still address the chipset choice as an important and responsible matter.