Xabre 400 Roundup - August 2002
Elitegroup ECS AG400Elitegroup was among the few companies who produced SiS315-based video cards and the first to create a Xabre400-based board. The new video card ECS AG400 promises to bring you to the magic world. The video card has 64 Mb DDR SDRAM onboard, with only a TV-out and a 3D-glasses outlet installed.
The video card is shipped with a setup instructions manual and a driver CD. It's strange, but no cables to plug the card to the TV were in the package. Quite unusual, isn't it? Normally, TV-out video cards manufacturers put cables and adapters into the package. Do they essentially add to the video card price?
The board ECS AG400 is made by a design that differs from the reference. These differences are clearly seen to the naked eye. What catches the eye is the video card panel. No DVI-out is there.
On the panel, from left to right (or downwards) there isa 3D-glasses outlet, a TV-out Composite, a TV-outS-Video and a D-Sub outlet to the analogous monitor. Such a configuration suits more to a cheap video card which will hardly ever come across a DVI-input monitor, but the two types of the TV-out connectors fit well in here. It's a pity that 3D-glasses need to be purchased separately.
On ECS EG400, another chip, SiS301DHMV, of a different SiS301 version is installed. Because of that, there is no DVI-out onboard, - only a 3D-glasses output. Below the SiS301 chip, there are jumpers to toggle between the TV-out standards:NTSC or PAL and select the interface settings: AGP1x/2x/4x/8x. By default, the board is set to AGP 4x/8x and NTSC. To the right of the SiS301, there are jumpers responsible for displaying the image. They switch between theRGB, YUV, SCART TV, Normal TV formats as well as PAL and NTSC formats.
ECS EG400 uses the same DDR SDRAM by EtronTech with the cycle time 3. 3 ns. This memory module is solded on both sides of the board, the way it is on the reference board. But here it is not covered with a cooler that is much smaller in size than that on the reference board. The cooler is plugged to the video card with two wires into other point as well, because the ECS offspring lacked the power supply unit availablr on the SiS reference board. The Xabre400 chip consumes not so much power to make ado about installing a whole power supply unit for it. A couple of transistors will easily cope with the board's power supply as was proved by Elitegroup.
The Xabre400 chip is exactly the same as that on the reference board. It is of revision A1, though released a bit later. Its surface is as mirror-like, and it seems to me that manufacturing chips of not only metallic color but mirror-like as well will soon come into fashion.
OverclockingAs is the case with the reference board,ECS EG400 runs at 250/250(500) MHz by default. But its design slightly differs from the reference, and there is a hope that the overclocking will prove the best.
Unfortunately, the memory on that board failed to overclock by over 20 MHz and the maximum possible result froze at 270 MHz where it ran without image artifacts and didn't hang. That must be its limit. On the contrary, the core was easier to achieve clock speed records and ran trouble-free at even 300 MHz. Sothe maximum stable clock frequency which we managed to make the card work at was 300/270(540) MHz.
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Content: |
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- Introduction
- Drivers & quality
- Xabre400 Reference
- Elitegroup ECS AG400
- Gigabyte SP64D-H
- Vinix VX-3340
- PowerColor EvilXabre400
- Performance & tests
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Conclusions
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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