SiS Xabre 400 3Dmark score

I've been looking for a really cheap card for an older box (Celeron 800 @ 1066) and was going to get either a GeForce MX440 SE or a Radeon 7500. In another thread I explained how I picked up an MSI MX440 SE only to find that it had just a 64 bit memory bus, instead of the 128 bit bus advertised on their site.

So I went back to swap the card, and saw a Chaintech Xabre 400 while I was there which was about the same price (CAN$80). I had checked out some reviews of the Xabre earlier, and it seemed at least competitive with the other mentioned cards and I decided to give it a go.

Anyway, I just popped it into another box that I'm putting together right now. It's not the machine that I bought the card for, instead it's a Duron 1300 on an Asus A7Pro, 384 MB PC133. With this setup I got a 3dmark score of just under 4000.

Wow!

Well I wasn't really expecting much, but I did expect a little more than this. I'm using Windows 2000 and haven't done any tweaking, so I think I can squeeze a bit more out of it but not much.

BTW, I used Powerstrip to try to OC the card. It seemed like it let me do it (I changed the clocks from 250/250 to 290/270), but it barely made a difference in the 3dmark score, maybe 100 points or less. I had read in earlier reviews that they had received some sort of locked version of the card. I had assumed that the shipped cards would be unlocked since the drivers are supposed to actually come with some sort of overclocking utility. Go figure.

**EDIT: I Forgot to install the Via 4 in 1 drivers. After doing so, the 3dmark score increased to over 5600.

set the slider from quality to performance, thats what most of the benchmarks were run at....from what i heard SiS degraded quality majorly so that the cards seemed to perform better

Just UNDER 4000? Isn't the Xaber a DirectX 8.1 card? Care to post a compare?

Yep, it sure is. Here's the compare:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5726356

I was using the "performance" drivers. Maybe I'll try reinstalling them, or trying the regular drivers and see if that helps.

the reviews i read said there was a performance slider....that nature score is dismal , but try newer drivers as all the reviews said that drivers were ****ty

Okay I'm an idiot, I did not have the Via 4 in 1 drivers installed for the board. I did that, and used the regular drivers for the card and ended up with 5673. This is with the Duron OCed a bit to 1429MHz, and the sliders in the Xabre driver all the way towards "performance" (btw I tried this before holding other things constant and it didn't make much of a difference).

Anyway, here's the compare:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5727407

The score is getting somewhat respectable, especially considering the price.

nice decent score for the price....

youd probably get like 8k marks with a radeon8500LE OCed to 275/275

Yeah but I haven't seen any 8500s for anywhere near this price.

$80 us dollars

I paid $80CAD.

That not too bad for that card, once you installed the VIA's anyways. You beat my GeForce2 Ti by about 200 marks! LOL! Why is the card only running AGP 2x?

Well your system is quite a bit better than the one that I was using for this, but yeah, I wouldn't expect it to beat a Geforce2 by too large of a margin anyway.

Not sure why it's only running 2x, the board supports up to 4x and that's what it's set to in the bios. The video card is going to a crappier box now anyway that can only support 2x though, so I didn't play around with it much.

Its nice to see someone that doesnt buckle under the peer pressure around here. Somebodys got to pioneer these other cards - were not gonna get anywhere buying only tried and true video cards over and over *cough 8500 cough.

Id say thats a real nice 3dmark for that setup. Especially since the xabre supposed to be a big scaling card, so with a new processor your gonna get some real big increases.

The Xabre 600 is pretty cool. It has the new micron process that the GFFX is going to be on (what size was it again?). THe performance is right on the heals of R8500 and sometimes actually beats it! OR thats what I have seen in benchies.

Aren't Xabers CPU intensive cards? They just take the scene that is suppose to be rendered, and use the CPU to render then use it's GPU to add some Instructions to help it out. That's what i hear. They can score near 8500LE levels using a 3.06HT P4 with 512 RDram using this form of CPU rendering.
That's what i hear is there any truth to it?

Thats bad, since the geforces use hardware TL and save cpu cycles

inspectorhammer said:

Its nice to see someone that doesnt buckle under the peer pressure around here. Somebodys got to pioneer these other cards - were not gonna get anywhere buying only tried and true video cards over and over *cough 8500 cough.

Id say thats a real nice 3dmark for that setup. Especially since the xabre supposed to be a big scaling card, so with a new processor your gonna get some real big increases.

Click to expand...

Yeah I figured that I'd just give it a go since it's not for my primary machine anyway. I don't want to be too much of an ATI fanboy.

Tebore said:

Aren't Xabers CPU intensive cards? They just take the scene that is suppose to be rendered, and use the CPU to render then use it's GPU to add some Instructions to help it out. That's what i hear. They can score near 8500LE levels using a 3.06HT P4 with 512 RDram using this form of CPU rendering.
That's what i hear is there any truth to it?

Click to expand...

You could be right about the scaling, I'm going to do some benches on another machine soon. The only thing that they offload to software from what I hear are the pixel shaders though, which are not too difficult for the CPU to handle.

Overclocker550 said:

Thats bad, since the geforces use hardware TL and save cpu cycles

Click to expand...

AFAIK, the Xabres have Hardware T&L as well, I think pretty much every significant card since the Geforce2 has, including all the Radeon cards.