Xabre 400 Roundup - August 2002
Xabre400 Reference Video Card
The first SiS Xabre video card we are reviewing is a reference video card that came from SiS. Basing on its design, video card manufacturers are already designing their own video cards considering the design specifics. Here is a green video card based on the Xabre400 chip with 64 Mb DDR SDRAM onboard, standard-sized, with a massive heatsink on top. Let's take a closer look at it.
On the panel of the video card there is a D-Sub connector, TV-out for the S-Video format and a DVI-output pluggable to a flat monitor. The DVI-out as well as the TV-out are enabled by a special version of the chip SiS301 - SiS301MV with a DVI support.
This chip has another RAMDAC, a TV-decoder, and a transmitter. Right above it there are jumpers. Using the jumpers you can toggle between the TV-output standards: NTSC or PAL. But the reference board we tested does not have them, so by default the TV-out is set to NTSC.
Most part of the front side of the video card is covered with the cooler radiator. Similar to first GeForce3 Ti500 samples, SiS installed a massive cooler on their video card to impart it a menacing look.
Such huge coolers are used to cool the graphics chip and memory, but on SiS Xabre400, first, the radiator does not touch the memory chips and only the core is cooled, and secondly, the memory is solded on the board from both sides, so if necessary we would have had to put the radiators on both sides of the video card, otherwise such a card would have been useless. Anyway, congratulations to SIS on the menacing look of their video card. The cooler fan is plugged to the board with three wires, but nowhere in the drivers there are options to find out the rotation speed. We can be almost certain that Xabre400-based video cards cannot monitor the cooler operation.
Under the massive cooler, there is the core itself, the chip GPU Xabre400. The inner circle of the chip, revision A1, is made mirror-like. Looks fantastic, but we're too busy to admire it.
The onboard memory is made up of eight DDR SDRAM video chipsby EtronTech. The memory cycle time is 3. 3 ns, the same as for GeForce3. The rated clock frequency of the memory is606 MHz, but in Xabre400 video cards it runs at 500 MHz, lower than the rated value, therefore, there is a good reason to expect good overclocking results for that memory.
Overclocking
By default, the video card runs at 250/500 MHz. The video chip and memory can run asynchronously, i. e. at different frequencies. The card ran at 280/540 MHz without extra cooling.
But it found out in the operation that the core of the Xabre400 wouldn't cope with that frequency, so we had to push the overclocking down to 270 MHz. As a result, the video card overclocked precisely by 20 MHz and the final maximum high and stable clock speed reached 270/270(540) MHz.
Page 4 - Elitegroup ECS AG400 Video Card 
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