The recent advances of ATI Technologies are hard to overestimate. This VPU maker has fortified its positions in the graphics market during the last year and today ATI offers undoubtedly the best solutions in some price categories. The last year was also remarkable for ATI’s attempt to take the chipset market by storm. I’d like to remind you that ATI had already had integrated chipsets for mobile computers in its product range and some mainboard makers, for example FIC, even use them in mainboards for desktop PCs. That said, the ATI’s previous attempts to make chipsets can hardly be called a success. The RADEON 340M IGP and RADEON 320M IGP never really took off. Our today’s review is devoted to another attempt of ATI’s: the ATI RADEON 9100 IGP chipset.

Watching NVIDIA succeed at promoting its Socket A and Socket754 chipsets along with their GPUs, ATI chose to put more effort into conquering the chipset market. Since ATI has a license agreement with Intel, the choice of the platform was an easy one. The ATI RADEON 9100 IGP is for Socket478 processors. It’s also quite natural for the RADEON 9100 IGP to have an integrated graphics core – ATI is very experienced in producing inexpensive but efficient graphics cores.

Although the ATI RADEON 9100 IGP was announced quite long ago, we couldn’t get one for a review until now. The engineering team encountered problems when developing the South Bridge – ATI has to earn its chipset-making experience yet. The problems having been successfully solved, we can now test the newcomer in detail.

It should be noted that the new chipset from ATI drew furtive glances from many mainboard makers. The leading companies, including ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte, have already announced their intention to create RADEON 9100 IGP-based products. This is of course no indication of the real advantages and prospective success of the new chipset. After all, the users will decide whether ATI can become a competitor to Intel, VIA and SiS or not. Does the chipset have a potential to achieve this goal? We will check this out right now!