Review: SiS Xabre 400

At our meeting with SiS in Oxford recently to talk about Xabre 400, we were assured that cards in the test configuration, possibly missing the DVI output, should be VERY cheap. £85 was the target price mentioned which undercuts some NV17 boards by a decent margin (15%). For better than NV17 performance, the price looks very attractive indeed.

Overall image quality was also very nice with SiS seemingly using a nice programmable RAMDAC on the reference board and good RFI filters for a clear and sharp picture all the way up to my normal working resolution of 1280x1024 in 32-bit colour depth at 85Hz refresh rate. It was solid and bright, something I can't say for some recent cards I've used. Thumbs up to SiS for the image quality, something they are proud of in the literature.

Cooling on the reference card was taken care of by a massive, all-in-one purple GPU and memory cooler. But with some exposed Hynix 3.3ns (333MHz rated) DDR memory chips on the back side of the reference board, the cooling solution doesn't take everything into account.



The board itself is small and will have no issues fitting all recent motherboards.

Using an SiS 301 processor for output, the display configuration is quite flexible and TV-Out quality was very good.

The only thing to let the card down was the sub standard drivers. They could be tidied up with OpenGL and DirectX adjustment exposed and the performance issues can be fixed as quick as SiS like and I'm sure they will.

Overall, given the price and providing the drivers are sorted, the card should be very attractive to anyone looking to purchase a card like NV17 (GeForce4 MX) or Radeon 7500.

A pleasure to test something outside the NVIDIA and ATi monopoly over consumer 3D graphics and a breath of fresh air.

Pro's

Performance for the price, especially in apps that use pixel shader.
The price, it should be around £85.
Image quality and TV-Out quality.

Con's

Driver ugliness and performance issues.