Conclusion
I’m very disappointed that this review was not as conclusive as I would have liked, the missing MX440 and/or Radeon 9000 made this review a bit difficult to judge. But that is not anyone’s fault, just a case of bad timing. Also I can’t let the issues in the UT2003 Benchmark go amiss, I really don’t think it was my testing; but it could have been! Other than that those are the only problems I’ve had during the 4 days I had the card in my system. It was stable, ran all the resolutions I needed and all the software, it even managed to play some games at the sma e resolution and settings as my TI4200.
Well what the card does do is show exceptional value for money, at its target retail price of around £85 it looks a bargain. The card supported all resolutions I could test with my monitor, right the way to 1600*1200 at 75 Hz. The image was still acceptable at this resolution although 1280*1024 at 85 Hz was much crisper.
Even more so big credit to SiS for releasing the first 0.13 micron card. A nice piece of boundary pushing on their part and should hopefully see for some nice overclocks (if thats your thing) if the Intel 'Northwood' or new AMD 'XP' TBread's. I have to give massive credit to SiS for this as this unlike 8x AGP is actually a large step in the GPU industry.
The TV-Out was perfectly acceptable and worked just as well as the TI4200 I had here that I could compare it to. This model should also have the digital interface as standard at its entry price point, which is another excellent feature for a budget card. The drivers were acceptable for a card in this price range especially if the 3d blah is an actual addition to the utility set as it gives you over clocking as part of the default driver set and OpenGL, DirectX adjustments.
As long as the issue I happened upon with the drivers and the price point is hit the Xabre 600 will be worthy opposition for the likes of Nvidia MX440 and Radeon 9000.
Pro’s
Price/Performance is excellent.
Improved Driver Features.
TV-Out and Digital Interface.
0.13 Micron Process
Con’s
Driver Performance issues.
All in all I give the Xabre 7/10, but if the driver issue was resolved it would be an easy 8/10.
