Card and bundle
The most important selling points are clearly shown on the front of the box.
A rather simple-looking card in most respects. It's a relatively small card that feels uncluttered. The cooler is held on by both some epoxy and two pushpins, and it's fairly quiet in operation, a must for those looking for a quiet PC. I wonder if they could have got away with a totally passive design a la the Radeon 9000 series, a card that I'll be directly comparing the SiS Xabre to in the upcoming benchmark pages. You can see the SiS301 chip that I wrote about earlier. This gives you more flexibility in your connection options.
EtronTech provide the 4ns RAM that's natively rated at the specified 500MHz DDR. Although it's bare with no extra cooling, it should go a little further than specification. It will be interesting to see just how far. This particular DFI board shipped with 64MB of on-board memory. There is a 128MB version in the range.
Pretty much standard fare here. The DVI converter is on the left this time, TV-Out in the middle, and VGA connection on the right. Note that the screw holes for the two connectors are only present on the right. This doesn't seem to make any difference to how secure the VGA or DVI plugs connect. TV-Out has a maximum resolution of 1024x768, and you have to have the same resolutions on both desktop and TV, unlike ATi and NVIDIA.
2D quality in Windows was pretty good when running it on a Sony 21" G500 CRT monitor. Whites appeared to be a little off-white in appearance and text was not as razor-sharp as the compared ATi 9000 card, however. DVI output was a little better and almost up to ATi's standards.
The bundle is a little spartan compared to some of the cards that we've seen recently. It can be excused on the grounds of budgetary considerations. A reasonably manual, a driver CD with drivers and various utilities.
