Sapphire-ATI's Pentium 4 board reviewed

WE'VE HAD A CHANCE TO look at one of the first ATI based boards for the Pentium 4 - an area where it doesn't need to consider Nvidia, because that firm is concentrating on AMD Athlon and Hammer chips, and won't pay Chipzilla the doubloons it needs for a licence.

ATI continues to work closely with Intel on many different fronts and this chipset is the first of many future products we expect to see.

The competition for ATI will be Intel itself with the i845G and now GE chipsets, SIS with its SIS 650 and 651 chipsets with the SIS 315 card integrated, and Via with its P4M266 and later the P4M266A.

For ATI, it has taken a long time to introduce these babies, and to make them all work, particularly as it's its first foray into this market.

ATI announced quite a few design wins with notebook version of IGP 340M chipset with some big names including mighty HP itself. The first focus was the notebook market which has plenty of room for ATI to grow.

We received one of the first A4-A985 boards from Sapphire, based on the IGP 340 chipset, which works with 400MHz and 533MHz front side buses (FSBs).

The board uses Radeon 7000 graphics technology integrated into the chipset, enough cables to strangle a roomful of people, a "TV out" raiser that lets you use dual view for monitor and TV.

The Radeon 7000 is renamed Radeon VE for the purposes of this chipset. It's the slowest Radeon but the first one with dual capability. These boards are not meant to play nasty games. If you run the latest greatest games on this kind of board, most of them will run unacceptably slowly.

With this card you can tweak the BIOS to address up to 256MB for your graphics card and you can set 1GB memory for AGP. The North Bridge is ATI's own A4 chipset, formerly known as RS200 combined with the VIa 686B chipset with support for ATA100 and USB 1.1.

This is quite a slow implementation, but as this is one of the first ATI chipset based boards, we presume that ATA 133 with USB 2.0 and DDR 333 support will come soon enough.

The board uses a standard ATX layout and like Intel's i845G it features only two memory slots. There's an external AGP slot where you can plug an external graphics card [Nvidia card? Ed.] that automatically disables the integrated one. The board has five PCI slots and AC97 sound from Via which works just fine.

Testing
We compared this board against one of the I845G boards, the DFI NB76/EA that we'll review later.

We used our standard configuration

Targa Visionary 19 inch display
P4 2.2 GHz
2x 128 MB DDR PC 2100 Crucial 2.5 CL
Western Digital 40 GB 5400 HDD
Aopen 40x12x48 CD-RW
Windows XP Professional

First of testing elements was stability and both boards were fine, with all two memory banks filled it.

The visual quality on the ATI 340 IGP was much better than any Intel i845G boards we have seen, especially on 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

Results
We tested the board at 640x480 800x600 and 1024x768 in Quake 3, Serious Sam 2 and Aquamark in 640x480 and 1024x768 and Sisoft Sandra 2002 standard.

The i845G trounced using 3dmark 2001.

In Quake 3, the i845G is faster only at 640x480 and it wins for 10 FPS while at 800 and 1024 ATI takes the lead, making Quake 3 almost playable.

With Serious Sam, the situation is a little different, with the i845G leading on 640x480 but ATI leading at 1024.

This chart says it all.

On Sandra 2002 you can see that apart from the memory, where the Sapphire IGP 340 loses by a big margin, the rest of the results are close. We don't have any explanation why this chipset can perform almost identically or sometimes even faster than I845G and have 670MB/s less bandwidth.

Conclusion
ATI/Sapphire did a great job with this board and it will join the fight for the fastest P4 integrated chipset. Visual quality is definitely on ATI's side and this integrated Radeon can offer you much more than Intel's i845G "Extreme" graphics. Performance wise, we don't recommend that you buy either the I340 board or the i845G without external graphics cards if you're a gamester.

But if you want a board for office, home or Internet use, this mobo is just fine.

In fact, it's now a little outdated with lack of support for DDR 333 or 400, but compares very favourably and affordably with boards using Intel's i845G chipset.

With the IXP 200 South Bridge, ATI will be able to boost some extra speed since it will be using 266 MB/s communication instead of the PCI bus one that they currently use, limited to only 133 MB/s.

ATI is going through the same learning stage as Nvidia was last year with chipsets. South Bridge building is difficult but we think the DDR 333 version of the chipset scheduled for next year will offer a good boost to the platform.

Sapphire is practically ready to ship these boards, we understand. For a first chipset, this is a creditable effort and if it's priced right, we're sure it will be successful. µ