At the core of ATI’s 3200 Xpress chipset is a single chip solution that supports dual x16 PCI-E slots which mean if you do go to a dual-gpu setup that you won’t be losing any available bandwidth on the PCI-Express bus – providing 8 Gigabytes of data throughput and that’s no slouch by anyone’s standards.

It supports all of today’s advanced features such as all the ACPI states, AMD Cool n’ Quiet, 10 USB 2.0 ports, SATA 3-gig, e-SATA, Native Command queuing, ATA133, High-definition audio and all the forward-looking advanced power management of Windows Vista. Again, the only dual GPU solution for this chipset – as of press time – is an ATI Crossfire setup; NVIDIA’s SLI will not “officially” work.  

There are three 3200-based boards in this round-up that we’re looking at and each one offers its own flare to ATI’s solution – each a bit different then its peers.

NVIDIA’s nForce 590 and 570 chipsets are its primary ones which are focused at gamers. The 590 adds support for better overclocking and “SLI Memory” – a fancy term for saying that this chipset can run very advanced RAM timings incase you want to tweak your system to the absolute max.

ECS is a huge Taiwan-based motherboard manufacturer which has been making good-quality products at prices that are very reasonable and should appeal to those on a budget. Over the past 18-months or so it has become known for its additional CPU cooling which vents air out the back of the PC. This extra bit of air-power doesn’t hurt; however, we’re not completely convinced it helps in overclocking at all.

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