Shuttle XPC ST61G4

ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

In what is becoming a slightly irksome trend for the Canadian chip maker ATI first announced its RADEON 9100 IGP midway through this year but it has taken until now for actual products to appear. At last the trickle of products has begun and over the next few months you are set to hear a lot about this chipset as most major manufacturers jump onboard.

ATI has done some minor league flirting with the core logic market in the past but it is with the DirectX 8.0 based RADEON 9100 IGP that it is getting serious. Over the past year we have seen how successful NVIDIA has been with the nForce2 chipset, which redefined the concept of integrated graphics and dominated the Socket A market with unbeatable performance across the board. While there will be platforms for AMD's CPUs appearing down the track from ATI the initial offering is for the Pentium 4; in direct competition with Intel's 865G chipset. Intel's Extreme Graphics 2 is a perfectly competent solution for hardcore cooperative Excel workbook action, or high resolution PowerPoint display. However for gaming, plugging your monitor into a dead fish would be about as effective.

ATI's integrated graphics (IGP) offering is much more advanced, essentially a trimmed down RADEON 8500 chipset. This delivers not only acceptable framerates but also all the other advantages for digital media that ATI's technology brings, including some novelties like the ability to use the IGP as a RAMDAC in conjunction with a RADEON AGP card for triple monitor support. Besides the graphics, the RADEON 9100 IGP also supports the latest 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 CPUs and dual channel DDR memory. Its Southbridge has basic functionality like ATA133, AC'97 and USB 2 support, but lacks the advanced features like RAID and native Serial ATA that are present in Intel's ICH5-R Southbridge.

As mentioned before, this chipset was due to launch midway through this year and we have been eagerly chasing products since then. We have had a few promises of motherboards that fell through due to problems with the chipset, but when these issues were finally nailed it was Shuttle with its sexy looking XPC ST61G4 that took the honours of being the first into the Atomic Labs with this chipset.

Based upon the same generation 4 chassis as the Athlon 64 based SN85G4, the ST61G4 comes with a brushed aluminium finish and snazzy reflective front panel with integrated card reader. Internally it is more similar to the common G2 series XPCs, staying away from the inelegant and fiddly separate 3.25in drive bay used in the SN85G4. The layout is generally good, although the actively cooled Northbridge heatsink means that care needs to be taken to tuck the IDE cable into its retention clip otherwise it could block the chipset fan.

Everything was super until we tried to run the unit and ran into a nasty little problem. Initially benchmarks would crash midway through testing and then the XPC started spontaneously rebooting. Three BIOSs, Olympic-class tweaking and countless emails later the problem was narrowed down to something endemic in the RADEON 9100 IGP; memory sensitivity.

While ATI has delivered a great chipset, it is incredibly sensitive to the brand of RAM being used. We tried several types here in the Labs, including older Corsair and KingMAX DDR400, however these problems persisted. Luckily, after hearing the problems were not just confined to Shuttle's product we tracked down some ADATA DDR500 and sure enough the system began to run like a dream. ATI does have a list of validated memory types up online (even though the ADATA is not there), so make sure you look at www.ati.com/products/radeon9100igp/memvendor.html to make sure your RAM will like the chipset.

We benchmarked the XPC ST61G4 against an i865G platform until it became painful. The kind of painful that only comes from watching a five minute Call of Duty timedemo take two hours to run. At 800 x 600 with maximum detail settings, laying down a whopping 0.8 frames per second. Such was the performance of the i865G in games. On the other hand the RADEON 9100 IGP was not showing cutting edge performance when compared with discreet graphics, but it was a damn sight better than the i865G.

In the shader heavy Aquamark, the 9100 IGP scored double that of the i865G, achieving decent framerates even if they may not have been playable. If you want great gaming graphics, then no integrated solution is really that suitable anyway, but there is nothing available for Pentium 4 that can even come close to the RADEON 9100 IGP. All it takes is some down-tuning of graphics settings and the games are playable, even if they are only a light-mapped shadow of their former shiny and sparkly selves.

Even though ATI's graphics are great, Intel's chipset range is much more balanced for general use, with some fantastic functions packed into the Southbridge dwarfing the basics of ATI's offering. That is the big difference between the RADEON 9100 IGP and nForce2; NVIDIA managed to not only deliver good integrated graphics performance, it did it alongside a set of industry leading features. ATI does the Northbridge beautifully, but the Southbridge is lacking that special something.

While the ST61G4 is beautiful both in looks and performance, we just feel that for this niche it isn't as robust a solution as an i865G based unit (despite its extremely arsey graphics). ATI has a good enough chipset, but like NVIDIA's first nForce, we suspect it may not be until the next generation that it becomes really revolutionary.