ATI's RC410 to fight 915G and Nvidia C60 chipsets

ONE OF THE best selling chipsets right now is Intel's 915G as many of the big customers are making systems and OEM motherboards around this chipset. It has decent graphics and has all the features you need such as dual channel DDR one and DDR II, PCIe 16X and slower, and Via ICH 6 supporting LAN, USB 2.0 S-ATA and IDE 100 and quite decent graphic core.

The 915G is good for corporate users and it can accelerate some of the video and some of the 3D features set and will let you play some older games like Quake 3 at a playable framerate. It has dual display support and this is what many of the corporate users are after, they sometimes wants dual screen but they don't want their workers to play Half Life 2 on their machines. We can't think why.

Nevertheless, ATI has some kind of quite delayed answer to this chipset. Its soon to be widely available PC410 is ATI's entry level chipset to compete with Intel. It will feature X300 SE like graphic and pretty much will be able to do all that 915G can do chipset wise, and will end up significantly cheaper.

We even managed to find a motherboard available from PC Partner. A lot of people don't know that this company has really strong bonds with Sapphire, a name that you hear here and there. The board supports 775 CPUs from Intel but we are not sure whether it can support Pentium D or not.

It supports DDR memory a much more accepted standard than DDR 2. And this company decided to use one external 16X PCIe slot and two PCI ports and is using ATI's SB400 Southbridge. It will support all key things such as SATA, IDE drives and all you might need for a corporate PC and it will come with graphic card that can accelerate great deal of video, supports up to 128 MB or shared memory and will be able to play some Far Cry and some low resolution and settings.

Intel also has the 945G, the platform with even richer feature set and better graphic but it has been slowly adopted due to its high price for an integrated chipset. However, at some point big guys such is Dell will just have to make some massive orders of dual core Pentium D CPUs and will want a cheaper dual display cheaper chipset and will no doubt go to Intel for help.

We won't be fooled easily as Intel is a nasty competitor in this area and many have tried to fight it before. Nvidia has an upcoming C60 chipset supporting Intel with 6200TC like graphic just around the corner and Nvidia is more experienced when it comes to chipsets. With its chipsets, ATI and Nvidia hope to bite into some of Intel's juicy graphic market pie but we don't think that big giant is going to hurt much from it.

Competition is getting harder and harder and if Nvidia and ATI want more share and money they have to squeeze Intel and get some of its numbers as it has most of the graphic market anyway.

Isn't it telling that the company that is absolutely not doing any significant effort in computer graphic, yes Intel, has almost fifty per cent of the market?

You can find more details about ATI's chipsets and PC partner motherboard here. µ