A large majority of budget systems comprise of an all-in-one type motherboard, featuring a wide range of embedded features. These motherboards almost always include onboard graphics and audio. Unfortunately, while they are intended on being budget solutions, the quality of the integrated graphics has been extremely poor in the past. Time and time again we have been told of new solutions from companies such as VIA and Intel that would change all this. Sadly we are yet to see it, as Intels Extreme Graphics 2 Technology was nothing new, leaving us all very disappointed. Even the new Media Accelerator 900 is nothing special, though it was an improvement on the not so extreme Extreme Graphics 2 Technology. Even at low resolutions these Intel graphics engines are unfit for a large majority of current games. Much excitement was created with the news of NVIDIAs integrated graphics platform for the Socket A platform. Once again I found the NVIDIA IGP (Integrated Graphics Platform), said to incorporate GeForce MX graphics, a disappointment. Although it was another small step in the right direction, bigger steps need to be taken. Surprisingly, ATi decided to produce an IGP based chipset titled the Radeon 9100 IGP. Early this year I took the time to review a Gigabyte motherboard supporting this chipset. The findings were most impressive as the Radeon 9100 IGP delivered performance that absolutely smashed the Intel 865G chipset in all areas.

The ATi Radeon 9100 IGP chipset was designed to support the PGA478 Intel Pentium 4 processors. Although the Pentium 4 has now moved to the LGA775 Socket design, the older PGA478 Socket is still obviously very popular. For this reason ATi have held off their LGA775 PCI Express chipset and simply updated their current ATi Radeon 9100 IGP PGA478 chipset. This new chipset has been appropriately named the ATi Radeon 9100 Pro IGP.

This new Pro version brings a number of new improvements to the ATi Radeon 9100 IGP chipset. The original Radeon 9100 IGP chipsets memory performance was optimized for graphics performance rather than system performance. This obviously let down the chipsets system performance when compared to competing solutions such as the Intel 865G. Therefore the new Radeon 9100 Pro IGP chipset has been fine tuned for both system and graphics memory performance. Other memory improvements include better memory support, the Radeon 9100 Pro IGP now supports a wide range of memory modules.

ATi have also optimized their AGP 8x performance, this means the chipset will be far more efficient with a graphics card installed. The original Radeon 9100 IGP chipset would be a few frames per second slower than say the Intel 865G chipset, due to the lack of AGP 8x optimizations. These optimizations or tweaks aside, we still have pretty much the same Radeon 9100 IGP Northbridge on our hands. Unfortunately the integrated graphics engine is still the same, using a dual pipeline version of the Radeon 9200 GPU. The graphics engine is also still clocked at 300MHz.

Originally, ATi found it difficult to create a Southbridge solution, which caused a number of delays for the chipset. Ignoring the integrated graphics solution, the Radeon 9100 Pro IGP chipset looks fairly bland with no real existing features on offer. However, depending on which Southbridge chip comes paired with the Radeon 9100 Pro IGP will greatly affect its ability to support certain features. The current Southbridge chips available are the IXP150, IXP320 and IXP400. Surprisingly Gigabyte is shipping the 8TRS350MT with the IXP300, yet the board offers all the features of the IXP320. For example dual Serial ATA150 ports are found onboard along with a total of eight USB 2.0 ports.

An excellent feature of the Radeon 9100 Pro IGP integrated graphics core is its memory compression technology. With a 2:1 compression ratio, the chipset has the potential to receive some hefty performance gains from this technology. Integrated graphics solutions share system memory. Meaning if you have 512MB of memory and the integrated graphics is using 128MB of this memory, the system is left with 384MB. The problem here is a graphics card which has onboard memory capable of producing over 20GB/s of memory bandwidth. The system memory is limited to a maximum of 6.4GB/s for an 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processor. Therefore, memory compression methods are most welcome as they can help utilize this limited memory bandwidth much better.

ATi has already received a great deal of support for the Radeon 9100 Pro IGP chipset, with all the major motherboard manufacturers offering a supportive board. When I say major manufacturers, this statement would be nothing without the inclusion of Gigabyte. The first Radeon 9100 Pro IGP supportive motherboard to hit the Legion Hardware labs was supplied by Gigabyte, being the 8TRS350MT. Like most, the Gigabyte Radeon 9100 Pro IGP solution is a uATX form factor motherboard, making it quite compact.