ATI recommends a few chips to be used as South Bridges in combination with their Radeon Xpress 200P North Bridge. The most up-to-date one of them is ATI SB450. This chip will most likely be used for overclocker’s platforms based on ATI Radeon Xpress 200P. Therefore everything we are going to say next will refer primarily to this particular South Bridge chip. However, I wouldn’t exclude the possibility of ULi M1575 chipset becoming the choice for overclocker mainboards as well. Although in this case, we will definitely offer you another article covering the peculiarities of the other South Bridge chip in greater detail.

Those users who have already got used to the rich features of NVIDIA nForce4, may be not that excited about the ATI SB450 South Bridge. This microchip cannot boast anything remarkable. It supports USB 2.0 interface, features a Serial ATA RAID controller, PCI bus and AC97 sound. Note that the Serial ATA RAID controller integrated into the ATI SB450 supports 4 Serial ATA-I channels with 1.5Gbit/s bandwidth (Serial ATA-II is not supported) and doesn’t allow building RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 arrays. The only real strength of SB450 against the competitor’s background is the integrated sound solutions, no matter how strange it might seem. This sound solution supports High Definition Audio, which NVIDIA nForce4 doesn’t have.

We are going to dwell more on the individual components of ATI Radeon Xpress 200P later in this review when we talk about the actual mainboard based on it. Here I would like to offer you a side by side comparison of the major features of ATI Radeon Xpress 200P and NVIDIA nForce4:

In addition to pretty scarce list of ATI Radeon Xpress 200P capabilities given in the table I would like to add that ATI doesn’t provide any brand name utilities or tools for work with the chipset hardware features, unlike NVIDIA. So at first glance ATI Radeon Xpress 200P doesn’t look too impressive against the competitor’s background.

However, this is definitely a way too early for conclusions. Especially since a lot depends on the price and on the real products based on this chipsets. That is why we decided to continue our investigation with a detailed study of the first mainboard for computer enthusiasts based on ATI Radeon Xpress 200P chipset – Sapphire PURE Innovation PI-A9RX480.