Card appearance
There's undeniable promise from an engineering point of view. However, it's a pretty plain-looking card in most respects
The S3 DeltaChrome S8 is designed to compete with ATI and NVIDIA's midrange accelerators. You probably wouldn't guess that from the Northbridge-like GPU cooler and bare RAM. It's refreshing to see that not every design needs to be covered with excessive aluminium and sometimes with more than one cooling fan. There's also no need for auxillary power, as we've seen on the GeForce FX5700 Ultra. The card's dimensions can be guesstimated from the relative size of the VGA and DVI ports. The back of the card can be seen here
The small fan is a genuine rarity these days. The cooler's attached to the S8 DeltaChrome GPU via a generous portion of thermal interface material. A 40mm fan produces a slightly high-pitched sound when in use, but it's not shrill enough to be an aural worry when housed in a standard OEM system. Perhaps a larger aluminum cooler and slower-spinning, larger fan would have been better.
A total of 256MB of Hynix's TSOP, in 8 256MBit (16M * 16) DRAM formation and with a HY5DU5618622CT-28 identification, is reckoned to run at 700MHz DDR, according to Hynix's literature. That's a generous DRAM speed, given the card's 600MHz rated speed. There's obviously no need for any esoteric cooler here. The DeltaChrome S8 also features 2 400MHz 10-bit DACs, much like the Radeon 9600XT, for high resolution work.
A DVI port, that's fed via a Silicon Image Sil164CT64 DVI transmitter and able to output to UXGA (1600x1200) resolution, hangs on the left. There's the ubiquitous S-Video socket in the middle, and the common HD15 connection on the right. Connectivity (and the wide range of video options present) will be a large selling point for the DeltaChrome line. Can we expect to see a dual-DVI version or a VIVO-equipped card imminently ?.
An understated design that doesn't focus on aesthetics.
