Can ATI’s RS600 Compete With Intel’s G33?

After intense delays, ATI released their RS600 chipset earlier this year, which was originally meant to compete with Intel’s G965. In May, Intel launched their updated IGP chipset, the G33, so Gary from AnandTech thought he’d pit it against ATI’s offering to see how well it fared. The overall conclusion is what’s expected. RS600 doesn’t natively support 1333FSB, of course, and it’s performance in some areas is a little lacking, though most of the gaming runs were in its favor. Worth a read if you are in the market for an IGP chipset though.

At this time, the abit board does not support the 1333MHz FSB processors at a native 333FSB. These CPUs will boot but remain at 266FSB and even trying to overclock the FSB manually to 333 results in numerous black screens or instability during testing. Our newly arrived Blu-ray drive from Pioneer would not work in the abit board. The SB600 equipped boards need a BIOS update for compatibility and abit has yet to provide one or even answer our requests. Also, we had a problem with a PCI based Firewire 400 card not working correctly, though it appears after a driver update this problem has resolved itself.

Source: AnandTech