Review - Xabre 600 Pro by PowerColor

Review by James on 04.30.2003

The Specs

• Memory: 64MB
• Manufacturing Process 0.13 μm
• Engine Clock Speed: 300 MHz
• Memory Clock Speed: 300 Mhz
• DRAM Timing: 3.3 ns
• AGP: 8x
• DirectX: 8.1
• 3D Pipes: 4
• Texture Units: 8
• Pixel Shader: ver 1.3
• Polygon Rate: 30 M/s
• Outputs: VGA, DVI, S-Video

What's new

So, what does this laundry list of marketing names REALLY mean? Well, Duo300 indicates the card's memory and graphics engines are clocked at 300 MHz, quite simple. The Vertexilzer Engine is a more interesting idea and probably worthy of a special marketing term, if anything is. SiS noticed that the CPU is much more efficient than a GPU (approximately 5 times faster on a 2.5GHz system) at processing various vertex functions; thus, they decided to leave those functions for the CPU. Makes sense to me. The Engine is a driver solution that is supposed to divide the workload most optimally between the GPU and the CPU. I expect future driver updates will have lots of tweaking of this functionality. The main advantage of this idea is that increasing processor speed dramatically improves, at least in theory, graphics card performance; whereas the technology of old made GPU performance and CPU performance all but independent. This can be a bit misleading, however. Obviously system changes will affect overall performance while gaming, regardless of the card you have. The point of this technology is to maximize that increase by taking advantage of spare CPU cycles in a unique way. I'm a bit disappointed with the system I had to use, because it is at the bottom of the scaled graph. The processor is supposed to start scaling much more efficiently after 1733MHz, more around 1900MHz. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to test this claim.

Xmart is a solution aimed to please the card and the user alike. It has 3 major components: Drive, Vision, and AGP. Xmart Drive detects the processes being asked of the card, and when more intensive operations are required, i.e. 3-D gaming, it bumps up the power of the card seamlessly. This gives the card a break and helps to increase GPU life while decreasing heat and power consumption. Xmart Vision is an automatic gamma level adjuster, adjusting brightness and contrast as needed, so your opponents cannot hide in the shadows. Xmart AGP simply detects the AGP technology implemented in the motherboard and makes the requisite adjustments for greatest compatibility.

The Xminator™ II Unified Driver is of great interest to many. As stated earlier, their driver set with the earlier Xabre series was plagued with problems by almost all accounts. SiS seems to have really taken the complaints to heart and built a new driver which is compatible with Windows versions to 9x to XP. Unfortunately, no mention is made of Linux compatibility for ‘nix gamers. The driver has a fairly friendly user-interface and certainly offers a wide range of options. From overclocking with the drag of a bar (you can set the memory and GPU clock to synchronize or not) to D3D and OpenGL tweaking options, its probably safe to say SiS has delivered here. The lack of options on display settings was the most disappointing feature (or lack thereof) in the driver set. 1280x1024 made text somewhat-blurred and 1024x768 does not provide enough desktop real-estate, but SiS offers nothing in the intermediate range.

The memory used is Hynix HY5DU283222F-33 which comes in 4-128Mbit chips, adding up to the 64 MBytes of memory. These chips support CAS3, which does not bode well for memory overclocking or performance. The 3.3ns DRAM timings will not help much either. An unimpressive hardware lineup for the most part except for leading the graphics market into the .13u manufacturing process. For those of you who are having to deal with a missing PCI slot because of the HSF on their .15u video cards, this is a very welcome upgrade. It will reduce heat and should allow for more extensive overclocking. Now for the benchmarking...

Above is the GPU

The SiS Chip

And the memory.