X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 6 (page 4)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/17/2005 | 04:37 PM ]

Sapphire Counter Strikes nForce4: Nitro-Accelerated RADEON XPRESS 200

ATI has been making chipsets for about 4 years now, but the company’s core-logic products have virtually always been tuned up for OEMs that required value, low power consumption and also reliability despite of relatively limited feature-set. Thanks to license to make Intel-compatible chipsets and pretty sophisticated chipsets for mobile solutions, ATI was able to secure about 5% market share in the chipset market, but given that the environment becomes more and more competitive, the Markham, Ontario-based company now has to put some efforts into making core-logic design for users seeking for performance.

Sapphire’s Grouper

One of the problems of certain commercially available RADEON XPRESS 200-series mainboard are certain BIOS- and performance-related issues that result, in example, in the lack of any overclockability. At the same time, some of ATI’s RADEON XPRESS 200 reference designs provide extreme stability, performance and overclockability, which really means that there is a difference between products oriented at OEMs and reference designs made to showcase the advantage of ATI’s chipsets for enthusiasts. Unfortunately, few mainboard makers had actually offered any enthusiast-oriented mainboard, but this is going to change, as Sapphire is about to roll-out its platform code-named Grouper.

Sapphire’s Grouper

The Grouper is not only based on RADEON XPRESS 200 with SB450 I/O controller that provides some extras over the SB400, for instance, Serial ATA-300 with RAID support, but also has numerous additional controllers to ensure sophisticated performance and connectivity. The mainboard has built-in graphics core with external memory controller which ensures that the RADEON X300-like core delivers higher performance than that on other mainboards without dedicated frame buffer.

Sapphire’s Grouper

But the main advantage of the Grouper seems to be enhanced CPU and memory power supply circuitries for advanced overclockability. Sapphire claims that its mainboards has even better potential than competitors’ NVIDIA nForce4-based mainboards, but it is unknown whether general performance of the RADEON XPRESS 200-series can match that of NVIDIA’s latest nForce flavour when not overclocked.