| 256MB XGI Volari V8 AGP Card - Page 2 of 8 |
Physical Features (continued):
The below left image shows a close up of the aluminum heatsink in the area where it overhangs the memory. The purpose is to provide more surface area to dissipate the heat from the core, but upon a quick look it may appear to be a memory cooler as well. Given the gap of several millimeters, that is obviously not happening. Taking the cooler off to have a look at the core first gave a surprise in the form of excessive quantities of thermal paste, as shown in the below right image. (As mentioned earlier this sample was not a retail product, so it may have been taken a part several times before reaching my hands... but it now has a reasonable film of paste installed).
 
The below left image shows a close up of the bare core once cleaned of all the thermal paste, and where the V3XT's core reminded me of nVidia cards I have used, the V8 core has an appearance that reminds me of ATI based cards. The default speed of the core is 300 MHz, which is a mere 50 MHz faster than the one found on the V3XT.
 
The above right image shows a close up of the memory, which is labeled as Hynix brand, with the following part number: HY5DU561622CT-5. Referencing page 6 of this PDF from the Hynix website shows that it is 200 MHz DDR SDRAM operating at 2.5V. This is exactly the same memory as used on the V3XT, but what is surprising is that the V3XT memory ran at a default speed of 207 MHz, and the v8 only runs at 201 MHz.
Not sure what I was expecting, but given that the V8 seems to be a bit more intended for gaming, I assumed the memory would be faster than the V3XT's, and that perhaps the processor would hold more of an edge than 50 MHz. We'll see how this all pans out during testing, though.
Now that the basic physical features have been addressed, let's have a look at XGI's published specifications for this card.
Volari V8/V8 Ultra Specifications:
• Blazing-fast PCI Bus Interface 32-bit PCI local bus standard Revision 2.2 compliant
• True AGP2.0 & AGP3.0 Compliant configuration setting
• Hardware auto detect for AGP1.0, AGP2.0 or AGP3.0 mode support
• Octa-pipe 3D EngineExtreme High performance 256-bit 3D engine
• High order surface tessellation
• Optimized hardware geometry transform/lighting/setup engine
• 2 units of Vertex Shader with Fully compliant Direct3D 9.0 Vertex Shader ver. 2.0
• 4 sets of Pixel Shader (2.0) with Fully compliant Direct3D 9.0 Pixel Shader ver. 2.0
• 8 sets high performance pixel rendering pipelines
• Supports Bump Mapping, Mipmapped Cubic Mapping and Volume Texture supports flat and Gouraud shading
• High quality anisotropic filtering
• Supports 2-side stencil
• 2X/4X full scene anti-aliasing(FSAA)
• Ultimate Performance 2D EngineHardware command queue
• High-speed Direct Draw Accelerator
• Hardware GDI 2000 Accelerator
• Source read-buffer to minimize engine wait-state
• Built-in destination read-buffer to minimize engine wait-state
• High Definition TV-OUT Solution with XV301PAL and NTSC Systems
• Composite, S-Video, and Component RGB Output Signals
• Macrovision Copy Protection Process Rev. 7.1.L1
• HDTV 480i/480p/1080i/720p YPbPr Output Signals
• A single link TMDS transmitter with excellent scaling capability for TFT LCD panel display
• MPEG-2 Video DecoderMPEG-2 MP@ML standards compliant
• Supports up to 20 Mbit/sec bit rate decoding
• True hardware VCD, DVD and HDTV decoding
• Video AcceleratorYUV-to-RGB color space conversion
• Bi-linear video interpolation with integer increments of 1/2048
• Complete graphics and video overlay function
• Hardware video decoder interface
• Independent VBI capture
• Supports DVD sub-picture playback overlay
• Built-in independent Gamma correction RAM
• Proprietary Cipher Video Processor
• 5 fields per-pixel motion detection de-interlace function, video sources from MPEG decoder, Video capture and AVI interfaces
• Down scaling function and scaling vector as 1/2, 1/4
• Next generation de-interlaced and 1/2 down scaling function
• Display Memory InterfaceSupports DDR SDRAM, DDR-II SDRAM type to 256M Bytes memory
• High IntegrationProgrammable 24-bit true-color RAMDAC up to 400 MHz pixel clock
• Built-in VIP interface
• VESA Plug & Display for PanelLink Interface
• Built-in Thermal Diode for GPU Security-Update
• Miscellaneous
• Supports 32K/64K/128K Bytes ROM decoding
• Supports 20MHz SPI ROM interface 1140-balls 37.5mm x 37.5mm FC-BGA package
Please read on to the next page for more... Next
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