SiS Xabre 600
SiS Xabre 600 Reference Layout
SiS sent us a reference board on the black PCB having a classic radiator with gold-plated look-and-feel, analogous and DVI- outs to connect monitors as well as an S-Video output to TV. We can't say the black color of the PCB makes it look smart or trendy, but the gold-plated radiator looks really cool. In plugging in devices, the D-Sub 15 channel takes the priority, that is, when plugging in two monitors the first will be regarded that one plugged to the D-Sub. The BIOS chip is not hard-soldered and can be replaced. Such a solution is rare these days. On the facial side there are several connectors and jumpers to set the TV-out standard and choose the respective interrupts.
We haven't come across such functions on modern cards for quite a long time, the look-and-feel sometimes gives you an impression of the past century rarity. Close to the TV-out there spots for soldering extra elements, which hints to the possibility of chip installation for both the video out and in. On the board there is also the wiring for a feature-connector, which is not implemented physically. The shortcoming of the jumpers is also in the lack of any legible captions, which makes it very difficult to sort out where a certain jumper should be.
Memory
The onboard 64 MB memory is made up of four Hynix chips having the access time 2.8 ns. To tell the truth, there isn't much sense in using such fast memory for the 600 MHz. Mind you, the Xabre 600 does not overclock that well, and it's not quite clear why SiS is after using such memory. The most likely cause is the need to provide a cooled operation mode. It's worth mentioning that no space is there for extra 4 chips on the reverse side of the PCB, which means the 64 MB is a finite limit for that board design.
Cooling system
We've got two pieces of news regarding the cooling system. The first one is good, by tradition. On the card there is a rotational speed controller, which at least in theory implies the card can be noiseless while working with office applications when the GPU load is minimal. It's impossible to test-drive the rotational speed in action, since the drive has no support for the cooler control and diagnostics. To all appearances, the declared XmartDrive technology runs automatically.
Another piece of news is that you won't get by without skillful hands. There is no sign of any heat-conductive material or thermopaste between the chip and the cooler. It's evidently a sign of useless saving. Anyway, the radiator is pressed quite well to the chip and finely polished, but we believe it won't be enough without thermopaste. The noise levels during the operation are not that high, - moreover, compared with the top-end ATi/nVidia or OTES solutions, the card is almost noiseless.
TV/DVI outputs
The TV-out has not evolved since the Xabre 400 line. As before, this is the same external chip SiS301. Therefore, its resolutions are restricted to 1024x768, but a TV set can be used as an additional monitor along with the master monitor. That is, you can leave the monitor resolution at 1280x1024 but and output the image onto the TV screen at the 800x600 resolution and then drag program windows over to the TV screen.
A serious drawback of the TV-out which we found out is the impossibility to change the TV standard "on the fly". The idea of reverting to jumpers nowadays sounds a bit weird.
The DVI-out is ordinary, no-frill. You can connect both an LCD panel through the DVI and an ordinary CRT/LCD monitor having an analogous input via an adapter. The card will certainly suit for use with two monitors although its 175 MHz RAMDAC integrated into its companion chip SiS301 is rather weak for displaying the output onto the second monitor.
What especially stands out is the excellent 2D quality on the master monitor. For that price category it is absolutely fantastic, provided the proprietary driver is used. The VESA modes under Windows XP look awful, run in the interlaced mode and are painful to the eyesight.
3D performance
At 3D applications, the card appears to be a full-featured younger brother of the high-end accelerators. During the tests we found no evident flaws or artifacts. No doubt, the Xabre 600 won't appeal to those who are into up-to-date and resource-hungry games. However, future projects are still being optimized for nVidia and ATi. In Doom III all the dynamic lightmaps were gone, and since other cards don't support lightmaps, all the options were useless. Nevertheless, the card was an excellent performer at RTCF and other OpenGL applications. Now let's turn to our benchmarking results.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
