ULi M1575 for ATI Crossfire – SATA2 and Fast USB for the ATI Chipset

We were extremely impressed with the performance of the new ATI Radeon Xpress 200 for AMD in Crossfire dual video versions in ATI's Crossfire: Best Overclocker on the Market? and single video versions in Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast. The Reference Boards showed the Xpress 200 for AMD to be a top-notch chipset aimed at the enthusiast with performance to match. However, we found an Achilles heel in our initial testing; namely, sub-par UBS 2.0 performance on the ATI SB450 South Bridge and the lack of up-to-date storage features like support for SATA2 and NCQ.

The ULi M1573 South Bridge could be used with the ATI North Bridge to add NCQ and improved USB performance, but the truly competitive South Bridge would not happen until SB600 from ATI early next year or the updated ULi M1575.

ULi apparently saw the potential and we have in our hands today an M1575 Reference Board that claims fully competitive USB 2.0 performance and full SATA2 support with NCQ. We never expected that AnandTech would be reviewing South Bridges, but we will go wherever we need to provide you with the best information and most up-to-date choices available. The South Bridge concerns also become more important as we have confirmation that we will receive ATI Crossfire AMD boards from DFI, ECS, and Asus in the next 10 days.

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ULi supplied the M1575 in a single PCIe slot configuration with an ATI RS480 North Bridge and a ULi M1575 South Bridge. The Reference Board was clearly designed for qualification of the M1575 South Bridge only. It does not offer memory timings, voltages, ratios, or any other features in BIOS to truly asses overclocking capabilities. While there are switch blocks on the Reference board with wide voltage adjustments for all the key components, there were no CPU ratio adjustments. For these reasons, our benchmarking will only test the features of the M1575. For additional Information on the performance and overclocking capabilities of the ATI North Bridge, refer to the Crossfire AMD launch article.