Sometimes They Are Back…

It seemed like we’d never again hear about Diamond graphics cards, but history tends to repeat itself. The unexpected happened on October 28 of the last year. Diamond Multimedia announced its intention to return to the graphics card market with products under the legendary brands of Viper and Stealth. The Stealth series targeted the value sector, while the Viper series comprised powerful gaming accelerators.

Diamond said it would remain neutral, without preferring any of the graphics chip makers, in order to offer the maximum number of products in each price niche. Besides that, Diamond Multimedia started offering SupraMax modems to its customers.

At the moment, the company’s assortment includes 4 models of the Stealth series (S60, S80, S100 and S110); the Viper section is empty – the company may be going to introduce top-end graphics adapters later. Nearly all Stealth series cards use graphics processors from ATI Technologies and, as it soon turned out, are produced on the facilities of Sapphire Technology.

One such card, the Diamond Stealth S110, came into our test lab. According to the company’s official website, this graphics card is based on the ATI RV280 chip. This fact set us back somewhat. With this “heart”, the card can only be considered a very-low-end product, since the RV280, although supports AGP 8x, is an out-dated solution, working with DirectX 8.1 only, while even the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 supports DirectX 9. I would suppose that this product is targeted at people who don’t need fast 3D, but this category of users are usually quite happy with integrated graphics in chipsets from ATI, NVIDIA, Intel, S3 or SiS. What’s more strange, this card comes with 256MB of graphics memory onboard, while a GPU of this class would be quite satisfied with 64MB. The Stealth S110 would be interesting for the owners of old computer systems if it were realized as a PCI card, but it is plugged into the AGP 8x slot… There are enough of oddities about this card, but let’s first examine it closely.

Accessories You Don’t Get

Diamond Stealth came to us in a multi-colored box that included (besides the actual graphics card):

• A CD with drivers;
• A CD with the Spy Hunter game;
• A one-year warranty;
• A warranty coupon;
• A brief installation guide.

And a few advertisements. We found no cables and no adapters in the box. Can you call that “accessories”? Well, you can, but they didn’t put in even the traditional DVI-I-to-D-Sub adapter! The accessories of the new product from Diamond are really poor.