We have recently told you about the world’s first mainboard based on ATI IGP320 – FIC AT31 Fusion (see this news story). Today we are going to address this topic once again, because there appeared first benchmarks of this solution on this web-site. Unfortunately, we were very much disappointed with what we saw.

To begin with, the mainboard appeared very slow in the tests working with the memory subsystem. Firstly, it was completely defeated by NVIDIA nForce 2200-D in the test involving integrated graphics accelerators. Moreover, its memory subsystem performance didn’t improve at all when we installed an external graphics card (GeForce4 Ti4600), while by nForce the improvement was evident.

During 3DMark 2001 SE tests in Direct3D the mainboard refused to work with an external graphics card. And when the integrated graphics core was involved, the mainboard refused to run 3DMark2001 in 1600x1200 mode. Although this mode is not the proper setting for integrated graphics cores, because of their low performance, nForce 220-D still managed to complete this test even though not at all successfully.

In all other benchmarks, including games and other serious applications FIC AT31 Fusion lost to all rivals even with an external graphics card. As for the mainboard’s stability, the new solutions our colleagues from GamePC site were pretty disappointed with it. We didn’t manage to figure out what actually the problem was. Maybe it was the incorrect functioning of the chipset North and South Bridges, because FIC used VIA 686B for the South Bridge.

We would like to point out that the mainboard is a very new product, so the problems could come from some bugs in the drivers and/or BIOS. Let’s hope that ATI and FIC will soon manage to cure all baby diseases, which are simply inevitable at such an early age.

By the way, things are not that bad at all, we should say. Some NVIDIA representative, who said that he would eat ATI mainboard if it defeats nForce 220-D, will save his alimentary canal from this turture. :)