Buyers searching for good graphics—especially for decent 3-D performance—in value or entry-level PCs can't look to Intel—its chipsets that incorporate graphics don't even deliver adequate entry-level performance. The company's latest, the Pentium 4's 865G chipset (and the older 845G) integrates Intel's Extreme Graphics engine—Extremely Slow Graphics would be more apt, though. And although the nVidia nForce chipset improves the gaming lives of those who buy AMD-based systems, a Pentium 4 version isn't expected any time soon. But business, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and graphics company ATI has swept into the void with the Radeon 9100 IGP, a new system chipset aimed at improving the graphics performance of value and entry-level Intel-based PCs.

The north bridge of the new chipset uses the DX 8.1-class ATI Radeon 9100 GPU core and supports AGP 3.0 (which operates at up to 8X) for add-in 3-D graphics cards. The south bridge contains the typical trappings: a 10/100 Ethernet controller, an AC97 audio codec to provide basic Windows audio services, USB 2.0 support, and an ATA-100 EIDE drive controller. The front-side bus (FSB) runs at 533 MHz, but at press time, ATI hadn't decided whether the hardware would support an 800-MHz FSB.

The integrated GPU in the 9100 IGP is a cut-down version of the discrete Radeon 9100 GPU used for add-in cards. The 9100 IGP has two pixel pipes instead of the four found in the discrete GPU and does without geometry transform and lighting hardware, so the PC's CPU must handle these operations.

Unlike most chipsets, which disable integrated graphics when they sense an add-in graphics card, the 9100 IGP GPU can continue to operate. And with the new SurroundView feature, you can actually drive three displays simultaneously if the add-in AGP card has dual-display support. This is somewhat like the Matrox Parhelia's TripleHead feature. ATI's implementation supports Windows 2-D graphics only, though, and there's no support for anything like Matrox's Surround Gaming feature