This chip is presented by Gigabyte Xabre400 64MB DDR, AGP card.
Features:
- SIS Xabre400 chip, 250 MHz clock rate, 256-bit engine;
- 64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Hynix 4ns chips, 250 (500) MHz clock rate;
- Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1000 megapixels/sec and 2000 megatexels/sec.
- Hardware TCL.
The card was overclocked to Xabre 600 (275/550 MHz).
Just after the announcements of Matrox and 3Dlabs, we were presented a fast one from SiS - Xabre. It's another effort of a successful chipset company to expand its presense on the graphics market.
The company plans to release the folowing line based on Xabre GPU:
- Xabre 80 - AGP4x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit SDR
- Xabre 200 - AGP8x, 200/166 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
- Xabre 400 - AGP8x, 250/250 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR
And another, more powerful solution later:
- Xabre 600 - AGP8x, 275/275 MHz (core/memory) 128 bit DDR.
Of course, the new SiS family doesn't pretend to heights and records of performance and architecture. But it proves the noticeable breakthrough comparing to previous products and features a considerable architecture advancement, uniavailable for all this-level rivals - pixel shaders hardware support. This alone might become a nice reason to praise SiS that stands alive on its own place, shaked by brand wars. Three factors are the most important in this sector: minimal price, good price/performance ratio, easy installation and working with.
You can get more details about SIS Xabre400 from its basic review, and from its logical continuation - Joytech Xabre 128MB review.
On the 10th of August 2002 the latest drivers version from SIS is 3.03.51.
Even without our Xabre400 article about its quality improvement, I can state that the latest drivers version is preferable.
You can compare screenshots taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. As we've already said a lot in the mentioned review about Xabre's 3D graphics, we won't repeat it here.
