The Board

Here we'll take a closer look at the board and the GammaChrome S18 Nitro specifications:

Board Details
Board Name GammaChrome S18 Nitro
Core Clock Rate 450MHz
Pixel Pipelines 4
Pixel Fill-rate 1800M Pixels/s
Texture Fill-rate 1800M Texels/s
Geometry Processor 4 Vertex Shader
Geometry Rate 450M Triangles/s
Memory Speed 450MHz
Memory Bandwidth 14.4GB/s
Frame Buffer Size 256MB
Host Interface PCI Express x16



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Club3D S3 GammaChrome S18 Nitro

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The board doesn't significantly stand out from any other board, looking like a fairly standard design for a graphics board with a 128-bit memory interface. With the GammaChrome series being targeted for PCI Express the board is obviously PCI Express based - we've not heard if S3 has any plans to look at bridging solutions to provide AGP versions, however given their current presence we suspect not, which will limit their potential customer base. With the PCI Express x16 interface supplying 75W of power the board doesn't require any extra internal power connectors. The outputs include a VGA, DVI and TV/HDTV output.

The heatsink on this early sample spans the memory chips on the front side of the board and sits fairly flush against them, although there are no thermal pads or compound between the chips and the heatsink, and nothing for the chips on the underside of the board. S3 have a newer HSF design that sits the fan closer towards the back of the board, over the memory chips, which pushes air towards the front of the board, channelling over the contact area of the chip. The S18 chip is also designed for mobile use, so thermal monitoring and fan control functionality is likely to be present within the chip but this is required to be activated on boards, often with the inclusion of some extra components at extra cost - we are unaware whether this board features this capability.

The memory being used on this particular board is 2.2ns Hynix DDR and is running at pretty much its top speed of 450MHz.

Although the board itself doesn't particularly stand out in any fashion the positioning of where S3 are aiming should also be considered. Evidently the target for this board is around the X600 PRO level, and boards of these performance and prices generally tend to use TSOP memory, which is cheaper than the higher performance BGA memories on the S18 Nitro.
Club3D S3 GammaChrome S18 Nitro