Board Examination
The boards supplied by S3 are infact full retail samples, so we'll cover the boards themselves here, then the presentation, bundle and the rest of the package contents in further pages.
First glances tell you the boards are small, barely extending past the width needed to implement the PEG16X slot interconnect. Carrying DVI and analogue VGA, the heatpiped heatsink-fan combination dominates the front of the board, heatpipe extending round to the rear of the board which we'll show you soon.
Noise wise, the 40mm fan atop each board makes barely a whisper, even when the GPU silicon underneath is being worked hot and hard. We can't thank S3's board engineers enough for that.
Looking at the heatsink assembly from the far end of the board, top and bottom, you can see the shiny chromed heatpipe joining to two sides. However effective, we bet it'd be even more so if they used a thermal interface material between pipe and heatsink sections. Almost all other heatpipe designs we've seen here at HEXUS have used a TIM to make sure good thermal transfer takes place, and while it doesn't seem to cause the boards any problem, we'd rather see it than not.
Display output wise, the hardware supports all of the ATSC HDTV display modes and you get the required cabling to facilitate connecting the boards up to a compatible display.
Somewhat disappointingly, but also understandably, the boards sport just one DVI output (single-link), along with an analogue VGA output and the video output port for driving a TV or other external display.
The board uses Samsung's ubiquitous K4J52324QC GDDR3 memories, BC14 rated for just over 700MHz rated running. The board drives them at that nice round figure, giving the GPU ~22GB/sec of memory bandwidth to soak up and utilise.
