If you're not familiar with ATI Radeon Xpress 200 motherboards it may be because this happens to be ATI's best kept secrets and also one of rarest motherboards to be reviewed by any review site. Perhaps the reason being it just doesn't appeal to the high-end crowd due to its lack of frill and overclocking features. You see the Radeon Xpress 200 is based on the ATI X300 graphics card so they may indeed discourage a large number of sites from reviewing it.

The main draw to this particluar chipset is the fact that is the only one endorsed my Microsoft for use with their Media Center Edition of Windows XP. With the chipset established as being destined for computers built as Home Theater PCs it only make sense that it is is optimized for ATI’s acclaimed Theater 550 PRO video processor on ATI’s TV WONDER ELITE card, a combination providing the highest quality home entertainment experience rivaling expensive home theater systems.

The Radeon Xpress 200 is a two-chip pair that includes a north bridge and south bridge. The north bridge is design around PCIe technology, given a generous 22 lanes.  Each lane is 250MB/s going one direction.  16 lanes are used by the discrete graphic card.  4 lanes are used for PCIe x1 I/O card and 2 lanes are used by north and south bridge links.  There are two flavors of the north bridge.  The 200 and 200P.  Both chips are pin-compatible for easy interchangeability and both are manufactured on a 130nm fabrication process at TSMC. The difference between the two chips is the 200P lacks the integrated graphic core and rely completely on a discrete PCIe x16 graphic card, which would cost less then the 200 chipset.

The 200 is more expensive than the 200P because of the integrated graphic core and PCIe x16 lane. The integrated graphics is essentially the same as the Radeon 9600 or X300 core, with two pixel pipelines instead of four, and two vertex processing engines, and completely DirectX 9 compliance. Radeon Xpress 200 delivers full support for for Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology increases system performance under demanding loads, and Execute Disable (XD) support protects against many common viruses. Excessive power consumption, fan noise, and heat are reduced with Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) support.

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