NVIDIA GeForce 6100 vs. ATI RADEON Xpress 200

It’s time to set the main integrated chipsets for the Athlon 64 platform against each other and compare their specifications:

The new integrated chipsets from NVIDIA look somewhat better from the functionality point of view than their main rival, ATI’s Radeon Xpress 200. ATI’s chipset is on the losing side mainly because of its imperfect South Bridge which doesn’t offer many functions required today. Particularly, it doesn’t support SATA II and lacks a network controller. Moreover, ATI’s South Bridges have problems with the implementation of the Universal Serial Bus which for some reason works slower in them than in other chipsets.

So, NVIDIA’s chipsets win this comparison. However, mainboard manufacturers can improve the characteristics of the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 by replacing ATI’s standard South Bridge with an ULi M1575 chip that offers better functionality. It supports SATA II and NCQ, RAID arrays of level 0, 1, 0+1 and 5, and has no problems with USB 2.0. But even the ULi M1575 can’t match the functionality of the nForce 430 – it lacks a Gigabit Ethernet controller, not to mention an integrated hardware firewall.

NVIDIA’s integrated chipsets seem to allow building more functional platforms. We think this fact alone is enough for the GeForce 6100 series chipsets to acquire a large share of the market and to become popular in home computers built according to the fashionable “digital home” concept.