Those who closely followed the news on the IT industry knows that the company produces kits ATI logic system (easier to say - chipsets) for the Intel motherboard. The first such product (chipsets ATI A4), the company issued in 2003. And to date, ATI has released a couple of generations of chipsets. In particular, we tested the board Sapphire Axion AA38L on ATI Radeon 9100IGP chipset and two charges of production Asus and Gigabyte.

It should be noted that the main advantage is the availability of ATI chipsets built videoyadra whose expressways and functional characteristics superior to similar products. But if integrated graphics withdraw, it becomes apparent significant shortcomings in the characteristics chipset. In particular, the possibility of expanding south bridges ATI almost always ceded not only Intel chips, but SiS and VIA.

So in late 2004, ATI manufactures a new generation of chipsets - Xpress 200, which are designed for Intel processors as well as for AMD. Gateway to AMD platforms was complete surprise to many. However, a prerequisite for this was still: since nVidia captured most of the AMD chipset market, it is not engaged in the development of products with a built videoyadrom (latest chipsets - nForce2 IGP does not support even 200 Mgertsovuyu tyres). A high incidence Sempron Socket754 processors and Socket939 require low-cost motherboards with integrated graphics. Here ATI and prepared a decision.

Concurrently, the company introduced version chipset built without graphical kernel. This Radeon Xpress 200P (code name RX480). Today, we look at one of the first cards on the RX480, which has been testing as a media kit 'of a ATI. But for a number of explicit and implicit signs, we found that the motherboard company made MSI (in the range named RX480M2) OEM order for the Hewlett Packard (HP).

So, the RX480 chipset is designed for AMD Athlon64 Socket939 processors (although in principle to support Socket754 difficulties, I do not see). Its key feature is the support of tires PCI Expresss: 16 channels for video cards, and 4 channels for other purposes. In particular motherboard manufacturers can use to connect PCIE x1 Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

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As a southern bridge chip is used IXP400. And for the first time the development of chipsets from ATI chip has a "modern" features - on the possibility of expanding it is not inferior to Intel ICH6: SerialATA support 4 channels (+ RAID 0, 1), 2 channels ParallelATA (at the ICH6 - only one) 8 ports USB2.0, 8 - and channel audio and 5 PCI slots.

However, if compared to the RX480 chipset nVidia nForce4 chipset, in terms of support for PCI Express, it corresponds to the characteristics Ultra version. But on the possibility of expanding it loses much: We are in support nForce have SerialATA II, the extended functionality of RAID arrays, 10 ports USB2.0 and powerful means of protecting information.