by Alexey Stepin
05/13/2004 | 11:57 AM
Once upon a time, about five or eight years ago, the PC graphics market was quite different to its current self. Nobody could imagine then that NVIDIA would ever be able to buy 3dfx or rather the remains of that firm, that Matrox would leave the graphics field altogether, that S3 Graphics would be nearly forgotten, that ATI Technologies would ever be the leader… Users had other names on their tongues. Our today’s review is about one such once-prominent name – Diamond Multimedia. If you was around in the second half of the 1990-s, you probably recall something about this company?
<%BANNER[article]%>Diamond Multimedia took a neutral approach to making relationships with graphics chip makers. Without swearing its allegiance to any particular brand, this company was producing graphics adapters of Viper, Stealth and Monster series on chips from S3, 3dfx, NVIDIA and others. Moreover, in the remote 1995, Diamond supported the fresh and young NVIDIA by releasing a complex multimedia solution Diamond EDGE 3D (on the NV1 chip), which was both a graphics adapter and an audio card. Besides making graphics cards, the company was also into audio card, modem and even mainboard businesses.
The red-white Diamond logo and Viper, Monster and Stealth brands were well known to users who wanted to get the best products. Probably, these were the most popular brands of that time. The company was flourishing, moving into new markets, for example into the market of portable MP3 players.
In the June of 1999, S3 Graphics announced its purchase of Diamond Multimedia. The deal amounted to $180 million. Ken Potashner, president of the company, said the aim of the deal was to diversify the technological basis of S3 Graphics and achieve profitability because S3 had been doing not very well. For example, they ended the year 1997 with a loss of $113.2 million. The companies were talking about a future integration of their graphics chip and card manufactures.
I guess you know the end of the story. S3 Graphics was doing ever worse and in the end it sold its graphics division to VIA Technologies on April 11, 2000, for $323 million. As a result of the internal restructuring, S3 transformed into SONICblue, but remained a co-holder (with VIA) of S3 Graphics stock. As you know, the fate of S3 Graphics was rather hazy: VIA’s new division never showed up in the desktop graphics market, but was quite active in the sector of integrated graphics solutions. Soon the name of S3 was not mentioned anymore by those who were interested in 3D graphics. As for the Diamond brand, it remained property of SONICblue, although they didn’t produce graphics cards. In July 2000, S3 announced its closing the Diamond Multimedia division, in favor of the Rio division, which was producing network and multimedia products. Since then, the very name of Diamond was forgotten and erased from memories of PC enthusiasts of that time.
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.
Diamond Stealth came to us in a multi-colored box that included (besides the actual graphics card):
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.
The card is simply designed. In our age of complex multi-layer PCBs, huge cooling systems and powerful graphics processors, the Diamond Stealth S110 looks very unpretentious.
There’s nothing of an interest here, only the jumper is unusual. It switches the reproduction standards of the TV-out. This procedure is performed in a majority of cards either automatically or through the driver settings.
You can also notice the landing place for a Rage Theater chip in the front part of the PCB and places for audio connectors at the back. It means that this product may also come in a VIVO version.
There are few additional elements onboard; only the electrolytic capacitors deserve some attention – it’s clear that the manufacturer made the card using the bare minimum of parts.
The TSOP-packaged memory is manufactured by Samsung, has 5ns access time and is rated for 200 (400DDR) MHz frequency, but actually works at 190 (380DDR) MHz. Note the holographic sticker with the logo of Sapphire Technology on the D-Sub connector – that’s a clear indication of the birthplace of this device.
The card is even less interesting from the back side: four memory chips, a couple of stickers with various serial numbers and a place for installation of a D-Sub next to the DVI connector. It means that this card can come equipped with two D-Sub connectors, which is rare today. Well, I guess there’s little chance that the buyer of the Diamond Stealth S100 is at the same time an owner of a monitor with the DVI-I interface.
The core of the graphics processor is cooled down with a simple aluminum heatsink with the logotype of ATI Technologies, which is dead-glued to the GPU surface; at least I couldn’t tear it off applying a reasonable force. I abandoned my further attempts in order not to damage the chip. The R280 chip itself works at 250MHz just like it should. The thermal conditions are not very good at that, the GPU heatsink as well as the memory chips would heat up considerably – like burning your fingers. A simplest fan would be good here, but the manufacturer just mounted a not-very-efficient heatsink and stopped at that. Of course, the device belongs to the value sector, but this economy cannot be justified: Gigabyte and FIC used to install much more efficient needle-shaped heatsinks on their versions of the RADEON 9200, which did their job well. And some manufacturers were even generous to cap the construction with a small fan.
The origin of the card was once again confirmed as it was identified by the system as Sapphire Technology RADEON 9200 Atlantis. The 2D quality was up to the mark; at least, the image was crisp in all resolutions including 1600x1200@85Hz. Overclocking was impossible like with any other RADEON 9200 that we encountered: the manufacturer of the GPU had locked the frequencies up.
Our selection of gaming tests was intended to match this low-end graphics card. New games are too slow on a card of the RADEON 9200 class or don’t launch at all. Some games produce visual artifacts.
We could only pick up a few competitors to the Stealth: the lowest-performance cards we had on our hands were GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (350/700MHz), ATI RADEON 9600 XT (500/600MHz) and S3 DeltaChrome S8 (300/600MHz). We also had a Gigabyte Maya II R9200 (250/400MHz, 128MB of graphics memory). We decided to transform the RADEON 9600 XT and the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra into a RADEON 9600 and a GeForce FX 5600, respectively, by reducing the clock rates of the cards (to 325/400MHz for the RADEON and to 325/550MHz for the GeForce). The frequencies of the S3 DeltaChrome S8 remained the same.
Of course, it would be logical to use RADEON 9600 SE or GeForce FX 5200 cards, but we didn’t had them at out disposal at the moment.
The testbed was configured as follows:
We used the following games for benchmarking the cards:
First Person 3D shooters:
Third person 3D shooters:
Simulators:
Real-time strategies:
Semi-synthetic benchmarks:
Synthetic benchmarks:
We ran the tests in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions because 800x600 is low by today’s standards, while 1600x1200 is too heavy on a card like the Stealth S110. That’s also the reason for us to avoid enabling full-screen antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. Graphics quality settings were at the maximum in every game, so when the Diamond Stealth S110 shows an indecently low speed, its owners will have to reduce the graphics quality to achieve a higher performance.
The result is predictable – the Diamond Stealth S110 fell behind all participants save for the RADEON 9200 from Gigabyte. Anyway, you can play this game with this card, especially in 1024x768. Again, we should have probably used RADEON 9600 SE or GeForce FX 5200 for comparison, but didn’t have such cards at our disposal for the test.
It’s not so bad in Call of Duty: the Stealth S110 only slightly lost to the RADEON 9600, which has a much more advanced GPU.
Unreal Tournament shows what a new computer game might require: the Diamond graphics card on the out-dated GPU doesn’t suit for playing it, that’s sure. Let’s see what the demo-version of the current-year Unreal Tournament has to say.
The high results of the Stealth S110 are mostly due to the lower texture load as the demo-version of UT2004 uses textures with a relatively low resolution. Anyway, this card again shows that the time of the RV280 is long past, although it yields a playable fps rate in 1024x768.
Gaming performance is too low even in 1024x768 – and this is not the most graphics-heavy game for today.
Again, a complete failure, although the demo version of this game is not very demanding.
Splinter Cell is not a fresh-new game, but is very demanding on the hardware; it appreciates fast execution of pixel shaders. Only the RADEON 9600 and the S3 DeltaChrome feel more or less well here.
Curiously enough, the S3 DeltaChrome wins this test. The RADEON 9600 takes the second place; the RV280-based cards are at the bottom.
Max Payne 2 is one of the few games that you can play on Diamond Stealth S110 without any disappointment, but only in 1024x768 resolution.
It is yet another defeat of the Stealth S110, although the S3 DeltaChrome is not brilliant here, either.
X2: The Threat is a space simulator in a rapidly-changing environment. You can sometimes witness a slideshow in certain nooks of the X universe even with a RADEON 9800 XT. You see that slideshow all the time with the bottom-tier graphics cards. You can’t play this game comfortably even on the GeForce FX 5600, which showed the best result in this test.
The owners of the Stealth S110 won’t have a chance to play Generals with any comfort.
The RADEON 9600 stands out of the dense crowd of the cards, while the Stealth S110 didn’t even make it to 3000 points.
The results don’t give any cause for optimism. The performance of the Stealth S110 is very low. What’s more, this card doesn’t support DirectX 9 – a sign of bad taste nowadays.
The RV280-based cards lose because they don’t support version 2.0 pixel shaders – they can’t pass the fourth test at all and 3DMark03 severely punishes cards that fail this trial.
That’s the only test where we see an acceptable fps rate. Anyway, the product from Diamond is an outsider here.
The second and third gaming tests confirm that the Stealth S110 loses to all other participants, and quite naturally so as it uses an old GPU. We don’t publish results of the fourth test because the Diamond Stealth S110 and the RADEON 9200 couldn’t pass it.
I was all confused after this testing session with the Diamond Stealth graphics card. What category of users does the company target this product at? Its performance is very low, but it carries as many as 256 megabytes of slow graphics memory onboard, which doesn’t give it any advantages. You can only feel the advantages of so much memory in modern games and in high resolutions where the hero of our today’s review would display a slideshow at best.
The official price of the Diamond Stealth S110, however, is $139.95 – that’s too much for a solution with pretty low performance and that’s more than the retail price of other RADEON 9200 cards with less memory. Searches of online retailers show that the product can be purchased online for about $92, which is fine.
The Diamond Stealth S110 could make a good graphics card for users who don’t play modern games, but need good 2D image, a decent TV-Out and a DVI-I interface. Who would acquire a RADEON 9200 nowadays? Looks like those, who use integrated graphics and desire something better. Buying the Diamond Stealth S110 you are also guaranteed to get a high-quality product from a well-known brand, which seems to be important.
All in all, if you want to get an inexpensive, but reliable graphics card, Diamond Stealth S110 has all the chances to satisfy your demands.