Xabre 400 Roundup - August 2002
Vinix VX-3340
Vinix VX-3340 is an illustrative example of a video card whose design differs from the reference. The Taiwan-based company Vinix have developed their own board for Xabre400 where the improved power system (Advanced V-Power System 1. 0) is used and requires a PC-Plug 12V socket in the power supply. The Vinix VX-3340 is shipped in a retail package in which besides the card there is a driver CD, a one-page user instructions and that's all - even a PC-Plug splitter is missing, which means you will lose one power supply socket in installing the board.
The Xabre400 board is different from the reference board even in appearance. It is of a very uncommon dark raspberry color and there are the same 64 Mb DDR SDRAM, DVI and TV-out onboard as before.
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Vinix departed from conventional standards and used a black D-Sub soket for the VX-3340. As we found out later during the tests, that didn't give any advantages and the quality covered in detail here turned out to be poor.
On the board there are pads for three jumpers, one of them used to toggle the TV-out between NTSC/PAL modes, another one triggers the INTA (what it is is unknown), and the third one switches the 64K memory address. The jumpers themselves are missing on the board, so by default it runs in the NTSC mode, with the INTA disabled and the 64k memory address set to Down.
It's strange to see the video chip SiS301 installed on Vinix VX-3340, without the letters "MV" in the name which are there on other Xabre boards. Frankly, that hardly makes sense, since the SiS301 does its functions the same way, and here it supports the DVI and TVI-out.
Of course, nobody would mind if I say that a cooler installed on the VX-3340 looks better than on any other Xabre board among the tested. It's not as big as that on the reference board, but it's nicer and looks much like those used on the GeForce4 Ti4600.
At the top it is closed with a lid that protects it from wires inside the case getting into and guides the air flow to the upper and back parts of the video card. The lid is easy to remove in order to see the cooler fins.
It's nice - the thick aluminum fans are bent in a way so that the air flow is split into two flows. The cooler is glued to the video chip with a two-sided sticker and is not so easy to remove, so we won't be able to have a look at the Xabre400 chip. By the way, the fan is plugged to the board with two wires, which makes hardware monitoring impossible. It seems to me that no onboard hardware monitoring for reading the tachometer's display is there at all in the Xabre400.
The power supply of the video card is in the back. Admittedly, the Vinix engineers made an honest job of powering the video card. The number of capacitors here is greater than on other Xabre400-based video cards. One of the reasons for that may be a necessity to convert the arriving 12 V into a voltage needed for the chipset. We can see a PC-Plug in the middle, among the capacitors. To be maximally honest, all that Advanced V-Power System is no more than an advertising trick, and the video card runs fine without any external power, i. e. its own AGP resources are enough. Why shouldn't that be enough? - the Xabre400 chip was conceived as a low-power consumption solution to be inmplemented in mobile and low-power desktop computers.
The video memory on board is made up of eight DDR SDRAM chips installed on both sides of the video card one upon another. Instead of the standard EtronTech memory module having 3. 3 ns cycle time used on most Xabre400-based video cards, here we used the same 4 ns Hynix module as used in theGigabyte SP64-DH. The 4 ns memory runs by default at its normal speed 500 MHz, therefore, the overclocking might be problematic. On the other hand, Hynix is a reputable brand. So, it remains to be seen.
Overclocking
The normal clock speeds of the Vinix VX-3340 are the same as before: 250/250(500) MHz After the three video cards failed to overclock the memory speed higher than 270 MHz we immediately set that speed value and checked how the video card runs at it. We could assert with absolute confidence that the Vinix VX-3340 will catch up with the 540 MHz in memory, which came true. Not a single megaherz higher. That leaves no doubt that SiS somehow enabled a hardware ban for the memory clock speed to go beyond 270 MHz.
Owing to the big cooler on board the core succeeded in running at 300 MHz. Set to that from the very beginning, the board went on running without failures. I must say we were overclocking theVX-3340 both with extra power applied and without it. It hasn't affected neither the memory overclocking not the CPU overclocking. Before that, only a card made by ECS was able to withstand the 300 MHz core speed. Quite promising.
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