ATi Radeon Xpress 200 Coverage

Good Morning Peeps, how goes the battle?  Things are clicking along nicely here in the HH Labs this weekend.  Yet another white-out with snow going on in the area, adding another 8-10" of the stuff before the day is through. It's all good though because there are many of us here on the HH Team in the Northeast and it only forces us to dig in on the bench-testing and upcoming articles for your viewing pleasure.

In any event, I thought it made sense to go back to yesterday's news regarding the launch of the ATi Radeon Xpress 200 chipset for the Intel platform.  We gave you a sneak peak in our CES 2005 coverage not long ago but yesterday the chipset was unveiled to the world officially.

ATi Radeon Xpress 200 Chipset and Motherboard Partners
  

ATi is claiming faster Graphics, Networking and Memory performance with this new PCI Express based chipset for Intel's Pentium 4 platform.  They even show gaming benchmark metrics with a considerable advantage in games like Far Cry and Half Life 2 versus a "Competitor".  The question is which competitor?  Regardless, an ATi PCI Express chipset with an ATi PCI Express Graphics card, certainly makes for a highly tuned platform.  We'll see in the weeks ahead as we get product on our test-benches, just how well ATi's new platform stacks up.

And then of course there are these very encouraging Cebit "spy photos" over at Rage3D (courtesy of HardwareLuxx perhaps?) of an Asus LGA775 socket motherboard built on a Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and supporting Dual PCI Express Graphics slots!

Asus Dual Graphics capable Radeon Xpress 200
SLI for ATi?  Perhaps...

We'll see how this all shakes out in the months ahead, people.  Stick around HotHardware and we'll be sure to keep you in-the-know on all of this new technology from ATi.