The Xpress 3200 is a revision of the

Xpress 200 The Radeon Xpress 200 is a computer chipset released by ATI. The chipset supports AMD 64-bit processors (Socket 939 and Socket 754) as well as supporting Intel Pentium 4, Pentium D and Celeron processors (LGA 775 and Socket 478). Additionally, ...

computer

chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components are ...

released by

ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...

. The chipset supports

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging m ...

processors for

Socket 939 Socket 939 is a CPU socket released by AMD in June 2004 to supersede the previous Socket 754 for Athlon 64 processors. Socket 939 was succeeded by Socket AM2 in May 2006. It is the second socket designed for AMD's AMD64 range of processors. Av ...

and Socket AM2.

History of the Xpress 3200 chipset

The Radeon Xpress chipset was designed by ATI to enter the realm of the desktop arena, especially the AMD Socket 939 platform where ATI's rival, Nvidia, had a clear market advantage. The

was launched with the Crossfire edition of the chipset considered as the high end of the chipset. However, rolling delays with the Crossfire Master Cards forced ATI to launch the Socket 939 platform while the Intel platform was scrapped due to time constraints. Reviews painted the Xpress 200 Crossfire as a board that could match Nvidia's nForce 4 SLI. With the release of the nForce 4 16x SLI, ATI changed strategy and announced the RD580 chipset. The RD580's difference from the Xpress 200 chipset is the 40 PCI Express lanes within the Northbridge. ATI said that having 2 chipsets with 20 PCI Express lanes would slow down data transfers when the chipset is working with multi-GPU configurations. They said that having all the PCI Express lanes within the Northbridge would be more efficient and have less bottlenecking as compared to the nForce 4 16x SLI. The RD580 was called the Radeon Xpress 3200 and was released on March 1, 2006. The chipset is also configured for the new Socket AM2, and many motherboard manufacturers decided to skip the Socket 939 RD580 and begin R&D on the Socket AM2 RD580. With the launch of the Socket AM2, ATI also announced the release of their SB600 southbridge, compatible with the RD580 northbridge. Originally, the SB450/SB460 was highly flawed in the USB design and lacking in cutting edge features as compared to Nvidia's counterpart, which resulted in low sales. The

ULi Uli may refer to: *Uli, Iran, a village *Uli, Anambra, a town in Nigeria * Uli I of Mali * Uli (design), by the Igbo people of Nigeria * Uli figure, from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea *Uli (food), a rice-based food * ISO 639 code for the Ulithian ...

1575 Southbridge was the other preferred Southbridge until Nvidia took over ULi. With the final acquisition of ATI, AMD renamed all ATI chipsets for the AMD platform. The Xpress 3200 Crossfire chipsets for AMD platform (Socket AM2) were renamed as the AMD 580X Crossfire chipset.

Common features

* Support for up to 40

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...

lanes within Northbridge. 32 PCI Express lanes dedicated for two 16x PCI Express slots. 4 PCI Express lanes for interconnection with Northbridge and Southbridge (A-Link II). Other PCI Express lanes configured by the manufacturer. * Compatible with either ATI's SB450/SB460/SB600 or ULI's M1573/M1575 Southbridge. * Support for up to 8

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

2.0 ports. * Support for 4

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

and 4

PATA Pata or PATA may refer to: Places * Pata, Sulu, a Philippine municipality * Pata, Galanta District, a village in Slovakia * Pata, Central African Republic, a village * Pata village (Samoa), a village in Samoa * Pontrilas Army Training Area, a ...

drives. The SATA can be formed into

RAID Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...

0, 1 or 0+1 if used with the SB450/SB460 Southbridge. Support for 4 SATA and 4

drives and the SATA can be formed into a RAID of 0, 1, 1+0, 5 or

JBOD The most widespread standard for configuring multiple hard disk drives is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks), which comes in a number of standard configurations and non-standard configurations. Non-RAID drive architectures a ...

if used with the ULI M1575 Southbridge. Support for 4 SATA and 2 PATA drives if used with the SB600. RAID support in the SB600 is still a standard 0, 1 or 1+0. * AC97 High Definition audio with either Realtek ALC882/ALC882D/ALC888/ALC883, SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit or Analog Devices AD1986A. * Support for up to 7 PCI slots. * Support for multi-GPU configuration known as

CrossFire A crossfire (also known as interlocking fire) is a military term for the siting of weapons (often automatic weapons such as assault rifles or sub-machine guns) so that their arcs of fire overlap. This tactic came to prominence in World War I. S ...

AMD platform

Xpress 3200 for socket 939

* Supports all socket 939 CPUs including the Opteron series for socket 939 * DDR support up to DDR400 and in 4 GiB capacity. * Dongleless

Crossfire A crossfire (also known as interlocking fire) is a military term for the siting of weapons (often automatic weapons such as assault rifles or sub-machine guns) so that their arcs of fire overlap. This tactic came to prominence in World War I. S ...

for the X1300 series, X1600 series, the X1800GTO and as well as the unofficial support for X1900GT.

Motherboards

* Abit - AT8-32x * Asus - A8R32-MVP * DFI - UT Lanparty CFX3200 *

Sapphire Sapphire is a precious gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum, consisting of aluminium oxide () with trace amounts of elements such as iron, titanium, chromium, vanadium, or magnesium. The name sapphire is derived via the Latin "sapphir ...

- PURE Crossfire A9RD580

Xpress 3200 for Socket AM2

*Supports all Socket AM2 CPUs. * DDR2 support up to DDR2 800 and in 8 GB capacity. *Dongleless

for the X1300 series, X1600 series, the X1800GTO and as well as the unofficial support for X1900GT. *Renamed as AMD 580X CrossFire chipset.

Motherboards

* Abit - AT9-32X * Asus - M2R32-MVP * DFI - Infinity CFX3200-M2R/G * DFI - LanParty UT CFX3200-M2R/G * ECS - KA3 MVP v1.0A * EPoX - Optimus EP-AD580 XR * MSI - K9A Platinum * PC Partner - RD580AKM-AA1D *

- PC-AM2RD580 *

- PC-AM2RD580Adv

Intel platform

The Xpress 3200 chipset for Intel platform is under the "RD600" codename, supporting

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

LGA 775 LGA 775 (land grid array 775), also known as Socket T, is an Intel desktop CPU socket. Unlike PGA CPU sockets, such as its predecessor Socket 478, LGA 775 has no socket holes; instead, it has 775 protruding pins which touch contact points on the ...

CPUs, such as

Core 2 Duo Intel Core is a line of streamlined midrange consumer, workstation and enthusiast computer central processing units (CPUs) marketed by Intel, Intel Corporation. These processors displaced the existing mid- to high-end Pentium processors at the ...

, and the support for multi-

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

configuration, as

, to run two or more

PCI-E PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial communication, serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older Conventional PCI, PCI, PCI-X and A ...

graphics cards in two physical PCI-E x16 slots.

Availability

The RD600 has undergone delays over the months, it was originally expected to be released in Q2'06. As ATI was officially merged with

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

on the October 25, 2006, it is being more unclear that ATI will offer more chipsets supporting Intel CPUs. Since RD600 was delayed, it was reported that some of the

motherboard A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expand ...

manufacturer have dropped plans to produce motherboards using RD600 chipset. However, the first motherboard using the chipset will be produced by DFI and the first retail product was scheduled for release December 2006, named as "DFI LanParty UT ICFX3200 - TR2/G". There are now actual products of "DFI LanParty UT ICFX3200 - TR2/G" on sale in some places such as Hong Kong and Singapore. As the NDA rapidly approached, some popular overclocking sites such as XtremeSystems and VR-Zone started posting teasers for the soon to be released "DFI LanParty UT ICFX3200 - TR2/G". However, a big surprise was the revelation that the RD600 was based on a version of the RD480 or the Xpress 1600 chipset. One popular reason for this was that the RD480 was also designed for an Intel platform but constant delays and revision issues caused the Intel RD480 to become the RD600.Tony's answer to only one 16x PCI-E lanes in chipset
/ref> Recent report says Asus has finished a chipset design for RD600.The Inquirer report
/ref>

Official features

* 2 or 3 physical PCI Express slots * 20 PCI-Express lanes configured with 2 PCI-E lanes dedicated for Northbridge and Southbridge connection, 16x PCI-E lane for dedicated graphics (2 8x PCI-E lanes when in Crossfire mode) and a 2x lane for Crossfire physics. The revised Northbridge - Southbridge link from the RD580 is used and a revised PCI-E controller built into the Northbridge. * Support for up to 6

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

Trivia

* The RD580 was codenamed "Manta". The reason was because of the use of aquarium fishes for codenames within ATI. * Engineering samples were completed just after the launch of Nvidia's nForce 4 16x SLI. * The RD580 was supposedly launched on the same day the Radeon X1900 but it was delayed to coincide with the launch of the socket AM2. However, with the slippage in the Socket AM2 to June 6, 2006, ATI decided to launch on March 1, 2006. * The package of the RD580 is no bigger than a US 50 cents and has a thermal dissipation rating of 7 watt. * The world record for highest 3DMark2005 score using Crossfire was achieved on this chipset during the launch. * Asus was rumoured selling the chipset before the launch of the Xpress 3200 in Seville. It was confirmed by various overclocking websites all round the world. * The Xpress 3200 is pin compatible with the

boards, making R&D much more cost effective. * ATI released the Xpress 3200 for AM2 after Nvidia's launch of the

nForce 500 The nForce 500 is a motherboard chipset series and the successor to the nForce4 series. It was revealed by NVIDIA on 2006-03-07 and released on May 23, 2006. The nForce 500 series supports AMD's Socket AM2 and support for Intel's LGA 775 has al ...

series. * AMD has renamed the chipsets for AMD platform as the AMD 580X Crossfire after the takeover of ATI.

References

External links

ATI official website

Techpowerup ATI Xpress 3200 Preview

Tom's Hardware ATI Xpress 3200 take off

Anandtech RD580 Motherboards

Anandtech Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe review

PC Perspective A8R32-MVP Deluxe review
{{AMD CPU sockets ATI Technologies products AMD chipsets Products introduced in 2006

History of the Xpress 3200 chipset

Common features

AMD platform

Xpress 3200 for socket 939

Motherboards

Xpress 3200 for Socket AM2

Motherboards

Intel platform

Availability

Official features

Trivia

See also

References

External links