Xabre 400 Roundup - August 2002
PowerColor EvilXabre400 128Mb
PowerColor produces a line of video cards branded as "Evil". EvilXabre is a line of gaming video boards based on SiS Xabre chips. The line includes boards Xabre200 and Xabre400. In fact, a long time ago PowerColor promised to produce video boards on nVidia chips only, but since the produce of C. P. Technology (the owner of the PowerColor brand) is too rich in variety to fit within nVidia chips, then PowerColor was did all tricks to cheat the public through producing GPUs of ATi and SiS under various brands, e. g Club3D. Today, nobody remembers that promise and it's no longer a shame for PowerColor to batch-produce gaming cards based on Radeon's, GeForce's and Xabre's. In our lab we tested one of the latest, Xabre400-basedvideo cards of the company.
We received an EvilXabre400 as a Retail package. So we were fortunate to see with our own eyes that PowerColor is growing better and now it's not that brand the public used to chase away. First, the package contains a large manual in English, German, French and Chinese languages. Secondly, there are two CDs: with drivers and utilities to watch PowerDVD video. Besides, PowerColor provided the EvilXabre400 video card (has a TV-out) with a S-Video-Composite adapter and a Composite-Composite cord. Although no one is likely to ever read the manual and the drivers with the DVD player can be made available from the Internet, anyway, PowerColor provided the complete versions, which shows an improving attitude towards the customer.
*770x930
PowerColor did not follow the way of inventing the wheel - it simply improved the wheel. The board itself is made on the reference design and is practically identical to the reference Xabre400 board. The PCB is yellow and has no frills, but there is as much as 128 Mb of DDR SDRAM, a DVI- and a TV-out.
*900x596
*900x599
If you look at the back side of the video card, you can see the labels XP400A, XP200A, 32MB, 64Mb and 128Mb. Does that mean that PowerColor is going to produce Xabre200-, Xabre400-based video cards with various memory configurations on one and the same PCB? Most interesting is whether such unusual things like a Xabre400 with 32 Mb onboard or a Xabre200 with128 Mb video memory will ever come up. Anyhow, Xabre is not the chip for which it hardly makes sense soldering all six possible video card options.
The TV-out S-Video on PowerColor EvilXabre can run in two standards - PAL and NTSC. Although only three jumper layouts are specified on the back side of the video card, the board hasonly one jumper which toggles between the TV-out standards. By default, PAL is enabled.
Since only a DVI-out to flat monitors is installed on the board, a SiS301MV is wired close to it.
By the way, there is no 'DVI to D-Sub' adapter in the shipping package. The reason is that nobody seems to regard the Xabre400 with its second 135 MHz RAMDAC as a multimonitor video card. But why? At low resolutions, if the video card has a poor 2D quality, you might plug a monitor via the DVI and there are good chances that the image will be better. However, the 2D quality hasn't been covered yet.
The PowerColor EvilXabre400 has an quite ordinary video card cooler installed. Even if the fan is a bit wider, it is plugged to the board with two wires.
The cooler is glued on the chip with a droplet of silicon thermopaste. If necessary, it can be easily removed to show the GPU Xabre400 itself.
1986 is not the year it was manufactured, but the chip serial number. We can see that it was produced a bit later than that of the Gigabyte board. I wonder how that will affect the overclocking. If we take only the external differences into considerations, then the Xabre is not mirror-like at all as it is on the reference board or that provided by ECS.
Although PowerColor installed 128 Mb of graphics memory on the board, the memory is distributed in eight chips on both sides of the board. Here the DDR SDRAM used was manufactured by Samsung with the 4. 0 ns cycle time. Again the memory is slower than on the reference board, although it runs on its default rated clock speed. 250(500) MHz. Having acquired some overclocking experience on Xabre400-based boards, I bet it won't get overclocked to speeds higher than 270 MHz.
But again - why should a video card have so much memory? Especially, the low-end card which targets at the market sector where each extra dollar paid matters much. On the one hand, those times are over when video cards manufacturers could rubber-stamp identical cards and consumers bought them on the basis of trust to the brand. Currently, every manufacturer is striving to make their own producs stand out against competitor products,which is revealed by our review. So PowerColor followed suit by producing the 128 Mb version of Xabre400. Well, Xabre400 is a new chip and it's still unknown how it will act with extra memory installed, isn't it?
Overclocking
The rated clock speeds of PowerColor EvilXabre400 do not differ from others: 250/250(500) MHz Nevertheless, 128 Mb is something out of the ordinary, so there is a hope to overcome the 270 MHz barrier of Xabre400. And - wow! fantastic! - the video memory did run at even 275(550) MHz! That is the highest overclocking score achived among the video boards tested.
We built great hopes on overclocking the core, especially because the PowerStrip utility was able to make the GPU run at 305 MHz, albeit for a short while and with poor stability. Assuming we are dealing with the most overclockable Xabre-based video card, we set it to the highest core speed, 300 MHz and were disappointed by the short time the EvilXabre was running in that mode. The disappointment was mixed with a joy when the board was running steadily at the core speed 295 MHz. On the one hand, we added 5 MHz to the memory, on the other - we lost in the core speed. All in all, we got a Xabre400 video card with 128 Mb onbord, running at 295/275 MHz. And this board is ready to challenge all the competitors.
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