Diamond Stealth III S540
First Impressions...
The Diamond Stealth III S540 is currently one of the better deals on the market. I believe the card curretnly retails at about one hundred dollars, probably even less as the XTreme is currently avaible for 100 dollars (after rebate). For this price I was quite surprised with the overall performance of this card. I currently own a Matrox G400, and a Diamond Viper V770, and of the three cards I can honestly say I prefer the Stealth III for my personal uses. My first impressions when looking at the box were excellent, as Diamond has again chosen a great piece of artwork, as well as some excellent screenshots of games running on the S540.
Brief Overview & Strengths
There are several key areas that this card seems to accelerate over the competition. The first would have to be image quality. S3 has done an excellent job in gearing this card towards people who want eye candy, as the graphics are a few steps above their competition. Even the G400 from what I have seen seemed to display more problems with graphics than the S4. The g400 is also a good card, but its DVD performance isn't on par with the S4. S3TC really is going to sell S3 products once more games become available, as both Q3Arena and Unreal Tournament take advantage of it. S3TC is one of the best new technologys I have personally seen. It eliminates the need for enourmous amounts of video memory, which when utilized can compress textures on a 6:1 ratio (correct me if im wrong please :) ). I'll later post some screenshots in order to display the image quality of the S4 when utilizing S3TC. At lower resoloutions the S4 edges out the competition on my system (P3-450, 256 megs of PC100 SDRAM, 6X Creative DVD Player, 4.3GB Quantum Fireball ST, 10.0 GB Maxtor Diamond Max HD, PCI Vortex 2). It really seems that if the S4 had higher fillrates it may very well have taken the competition in many areas. It looks as if the S2000+ may do the oposite and take the competition in higher resoloutions (which i defenitely wouldn't mind either =) ). The S540 still manages to run most if not all games (with the exception of Q3Arena) run quite well at 1024x768. Unreal Tournament for example ran beautifully at 1024x768.
Check back soon for a completed review
Saturday, November 13, 1999 08:43 PM