ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 Chipset Preview

The Reference Board

The ATI Reference Board:

As always the reference boards we receive will never hit the market, but we feel it is worth showing them. Our reference board came looking pretty plain, but featured the latest in technology. Let’s take a closer look at the reference design.

Four slots for dual channel DDR1 memory can be found here. We found that all four DIMM slots could be filled and run with PC-3200 memory at 2-2-2-5 timings without having any stability issues.

The southbridge is covered by a small heat sink to help keep everything cool. Just to the right of the southbridge you will find four SATA connectors and two PATA channels for your storage and optical devices.

Here we find a single x16 PCIe connector for graphics as well as three additional x1 PCIe connectors and two legacy PCI connectors.

The Back Panel I/O looks to be nothing out of the ordinary. Here we find the Keyboard and Mouse PS/2 ports, 4 USB2.0 ports, 1 Parallel port, 1 VGA out, 1 RJ45 LAN port, 1 IEEE 1394 port, and three different analog audio ports. The one thing that stands out is the DVO output! This means that this board can support two displays out of the box with no modifications or extra money on add-in cards.

Here is a close up of the northbridge and the memory chip for the integrated video. The memory chip is a Samsung 428 with a part number of K4D26323QG-GC25. This is a 400MHz DDR part and has the ability to transfer data at 800Mbps per pin.