Article Info Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme Review Created: September 20, 1999 By: Silvino Orozco Brent Kerby Category: Graphics Guide Summary: The higher clocked version of this Savage4 chip comes at 166MHz. Given Diamond's relationship with S3, they are the first supplier of the faster graphics engine. Find out if the performance can keep up with today's games.

Introduction

After all the hype of the upcoming "high-end" graphics cards, we feel that we should also look into the important area of the low and medium ranged graphic boards. Not everyone can afford the higher price tag on most of the big performers out in the market right now so we felt it was time to bring you word of one of the new players in the price/performance oriented market. The main competitors of the S540 Xtreme in my opinion are NVIDIA M64 based cards, i752 graphics boards, Voodoo3 2000, and products with the ATI Rage 128 chip. We also included the results of some of the more expensive top dogs into the review to provide an idea where the performance of these medium range graphics boards sit.

What's so cool about the S540 Xtreme?

Most of us are familiar with Savage4 based graphics products. We talked about the Diamond Stealth III S540 in our huge "32 Graphic Card Meltdown - Part One" and "Part Two". Basically, the only difference between the S540 and the S540 Xtreme is the core & memory clocks.

Diamond Stealth III S540
Core Clock	125MHz
Memory Clock	143MHz
Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme
Core Clock	166MHz
Memory Clock	166MHz

How much does the 41MHz increase to the Savage4 core clock and the additional 23MHz frequency in the memory clock affect performance? Let's look at our game benchmark test suite and find out. Even though the core clock has changed the temperature of the graphics chip isn't affected much. We measured only a 4C difference between the S540 and S540 Xtreme. The S540 measured 64C while the S540 Extreme's temperature hit 68C.

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