by FastSite
05/15/2002 | 12:00 AM
Today the most popular ATI chips are RADEON 8500, RADEON 7500 and RADEON 7000. The fastest of them, RADEON 8500 is positioned as an expensive solution in the performance sector, the slowest chip, RADEON 7000 (RADEON VE), is positioned as a low cost office product. RADEON 7500 graphics chip is used in the mainstream products and graphics cards based on it perform as fast as NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/ Pro / Ti.<%BANNER[article]%>
Cheaper graphics cards based on ATI RADEON and ATI RADEON + SDR memory have already got outdated, that is why no wonder that the market needed a modern solution cheaper than RADEON 7500 and at the same time faster than RADEON VE.
The one to take the risks and to perform this experiment appeared Gigabyte, which released a graphics card on ATI RADEON 7500 LE chip equipped with SDRAM. It is Gigabyte GV-AR64S. This solution attracted our attention not only because of its remarkable design and features, but also gave us a clear idea of what "ATI RADEON 7500 + SDRAM graphics memory" combo is worth.
Gigabyte GV-AR64S graphics card is shipped as a retail product in the following beautiful box:
The package contains the card of course, a very interesting cable provided with a connector for the graphics card on one end and with S-Video and RCA connectors on the other.
As for the software bundle, there are a CD-disk with the drivers, and utilities, and another CD with the software PowerDVD XP from Cyberlink, which I consider the best utility of the kind among all exiting utilities. Besides, I found 6 (!) CD-disks with different games in the box:
Here I would like to say a bit more. Although, there are no masterpieces, like Max Payne among them, all the games are pretty good and their amount is simply impressive:
I believe that European and American customers will be very pleased with this user care on Gigabyte's part. All of you can imagine how much the poor citizens of these civilized countries have to pay for licensed software, where the games also belong. As for us, Russians, who are not used to thinking about real cost of software stuff, this free enclosure doesn't attract at all. On the one hand, it is good, but on the other this situation is quite sad I should say. But, this is life, nothing to do about it.
Returning to the graphics card package, I would like to point out only one unpleasant thing: the package doesn't include the DVI-I converter, so that we could connect two analogue displays to it.
Gigabyte engineers decided not to follow ATI's reference design when they worked on GV-AR64S. Firstly, the used SDRAM instead of DDR SDRAM, and secondly, they placed almost all the electronic components onto the front side of the PCB, which reduced the mounting costs significantly:
The graphics core and memory chips are covered with a solid heatsink making a really respectful impression:
As for the thermal interface improving the contact between the heatsink and the chips, Gigabyte engineers used some sticky foil, which could be as efficient as thermal paste if it hadn't been for the bubbles and other foil irregularities. Besides, if we also take into account that the graphics memory chips on RADEON 7500 based graphics cards do not actually need any cooling, then this heatsink can be regarded only as a fashion thing, and not as a necessity.
Here is the heart of our GV-AR64S graphics card: ATI RADEON 7500 chip:
The graphics core works at 256MHz. as you remember, the nominal core frequency of RADEON 7500 chip installed onto retail cards from ATI equals 290MHz. The box with Gigabyte GV-AR64S says that the card is based on ATI RADEON 7500 LE, but why the core clock frequency is set particularly to 256MHz and not to 250MHz or 270MHz, remains a mystery for me.
The first and the major peculiarity of GV-AR64S from Gigabyte is the SDRAM memory instead of DDR SDRAM. The graphics card is equipped with 64MB SDRAM produced by Hynix and featuring 5ns access time:
Although the top working frequency supported by these chips is equal to 200MHz, the memory of GV-AR64S works only at 175MHz. later in this article we will try to figure out why the working frequency of the memory is so low, and what effect SDRAM used instead of DDR SDRAM has on RADEON 7500 performance.
The second remarkable peculiarity of Gigabyte GV-AR64S is the hardware monitoring implemented via W83L785R from Winbond:
Its functions include: controlling 4 voltages, rotation speeds of two coolers and 2 temperatures. Besides, the chip features two switching regulators controlling the cooler rotation speed by changing their voltage.
The features of this chip are used far not entirely. GV-AR64S is equipped with only one cooler with the rotation speed sensor and one thermal diode pressed tightly to the bottom of the heatsink:
Of course, in order to let the user watch the status of his graphics card, special software is required. Gigabyte offers a special V-Tuner utility, which should work with all Gigabyte graphics cards on ATI RADEON 7500/8500 chips.
As soon as you install it, you will get a small Gigabyte icon in the system tray:
When you click the icon, you get a menu with a list of standard settings for the entire system, monitor, graphics card and desktop:
The most interesting part here is Gigabyte V-Tuner utility (as you may see, on the menu it is called V-Tunner with double "n". I wonder if it is just a misprint…).
When you load V-Tuner, you get a very originally looking interface guiding you through the graphics card overclocking procedure:
And where is the praised hardware monitoring then? As you see, it is not there! However, when you click "HELP" a window pops up where all the V-Tuner functions are described in detail. It is there that you see all the missing functions:
It looks as if V-Tuner utility has been initially designed for ATI RADEON 8500 based graphics cards, and hasn't been yet adapted for GV-AR64S. Very upsetting fact, I should say.
Well, we have told you enough about the graphics card, I suppose. The last thing I would like to mention is the DVI-I out and video-Out implemented on the graphics card from Gigabyte, and the support of dual-display configurations (including TV-set, analogue or digital monitor), just like by RADEON 7500 based card from ATI.
Together with Gigabyte GV-AR64S we tested the following graphics cards:
Our testbed was configured as follows:
Software:
We ran these applications in the following modes:
Quality mode implied the highest graphics quality: disabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (in order to provide equal conditions or the tested graphics cards), 32bit texture and frame buffer.
Speed mode incorporated the lowest graphics quality (16bit texture and frame buffer).
In the Max Payne test we used benchmark mod and PCGH's Final Scene No1, which are described in detail on the 3DCenter web-site.
Speed mode: "Speed" graphics quality settings, 16bit color modes;
Quality mode: "Quality" graphics quality settings, 32bit color modes.
For this test we launched a standard "The Grand Cathedral" demo.
16bit: 16bit frame buffer, 16bit textures, 16bit frame buffer, D3D hardware T&L.
32bit: 32bit frame buffer, 32bit textures and 32 (24) bit Z-buffer, D3D hardware T&L mode.
As we tested mostly Low-End products, all the tests were run in case the level of detail was set to "Low Detail".
All tests were run with the highest graphics quality settings, with tri-linear filtering and texture compression enabled.
During the testing, we used two modes:
We tested with a standard four demo included into Quake3 Arena 1.30 patch.
Let's start with the gaming tests from 3DMark2001 set:
GV-AR64S yields to ATI RADEON 7500 LE up to 20% of performance in 16bit modes and up to 35% - in 32bit modes.
As a result, RADEON 7500 with SDR memory loses about 3 times more speed when shifting from 16bit to 32bit modes than ATI RADEON 7500 withy DDR SDRAM. 25-30% this is the price we have to pay for the opportunity to use SDR graphics memory.
At the same time, GV-AR64S performs nearly as fast as NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 in 800x600, while in higher resolutions it leaves the competitor behind due to HyperZ technology.
Here ATI based graphics cards defeated all the NVIDIA based competitors due to faster polygon fillrate and optimized operation with the Z-buffer: in 32bit mode RADEON 7500 LE outpaced NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti, and GV-AR64S proved much faster than GeForce2 MX400 in both: 16bit and 32bit modes.
Here the results are highly influenced by the CPU and the overall system performance. But even in these conditions NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 fell very far behind GV-AR64S, RADEON 7500 with SDR graphics memory raced ahead of GeForce2 MX400 due to HyperZ technology, higher core frequency and as a result, faster polygon processing and texturing.
Here GV-AR64S and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 show almost similar results despite all the advantages of GV-AR64S. It must be excellent optimization of the NVIDIA OpenGL driver and insufficient optimization of the ATI driver that tell here.
If we compare our today's hero with ATI RADEON 7500 LE, we will see that the latter is 25% faster than GV-AR64S in 16bit modes and around 40% faster in 32bit modes.
In Serious Sam: The Second Encounter the situation remains the same, however, GV-AR64S falls even more behind ATI RADEON 7500 LE and slightly surpasses NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400.
Summing up the results of our test session for Gigabyte GV-AR64S graphics card, I can conclude that the use of slower SDR memory working only at 175MHz made the card lag behind ATI RADEON 7500 LE by about 25%-30% on the average in 16bit modes and about 35%-40% in 32bit modes.
In most cases GV-AR64S outpaces NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400, although a huge gap between them in Direct3D tests turns into a hardly noticeable advantage in OpenGL: Quake3 Arena and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.
In OpenGL Gigabyte GV-AR64S is more or less ahead of GeForce2 MX400 only in high resolutions, but these rates do not have any actual practical value, as you will anyway never play games with this graphics card in high resolutions.
Gigabyte GV-AR64S is not built on ATI's reference design, and we all know very well what this initiative may lead to. I said "may", which implies that thing shouldn't necessarily turn out dramatic. :)
Unfortunately, we have to point out that the graphics card we had at our disposal doesn't provide as good 2D image quality as those ATI RADEON 7500 graphics cards following the reference design do.
In 1280x1024 Gigabyte GV-AR64S was already showing slight blurring effects, while ATI RADEON 7500 didn't arouse any reproach up to 1600x1200 (inclusive).
The overclocking potential of Gigabyte GV-AR64S appeared not very impressive. The maximum frequencies where the card remained stable were 280MHz for the core and 185Mhz for the memory.
I think that that it is the deviations from the reference design by Gigabyte GV-AR64S that might have caused this low overclockability.
Gigabyte GV-AR64S is a worthy competitor to NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 based graphics cards. Everything else seems to be too tough for this solution, like for any other solution built on ATI RADEON 7500 and equipped with SDRAM graphics memory, as this slow memory simply brings to naught the entire graphics chip potential.
Of course, RADEON 7500 is a more up-to-date faster solution than NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 and it boasts such advantages as high 2D image quality, high quality TV-Out implementation, can lay three textures per pass, supports HyperZ technology, fast anisotropic filtering, EMBM, etc. However, in case it is accompanied with SDR memory it has only one chance to become popular: if it sells at reasonable price. Here "reasonable" means the same or a little bit higher than the price of high-quality "dualhead" GeForce2 MX400 based cards.
Otherwise, graphics cards built on ATI RADEON 7500 and equipped with SDR graphics memory will have very unstable positions in the graphics market. On the one hand, they will be opposed by faster 3D solutions on NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti and ATI RADEON 7500 with DDR SDRAM, and on the other - by ATI RADEON VE and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400.
That was our comment on the chip and memory combination. As for Gigabyte GV-AR64S graphics card, we have already made some comments on the way, so it makes sense to sum up all the highs and lows for your convenience. Of course, all the advantages and drawbacks typical of ATI RADEON 7500 chip are valid for Gigabyte GV-AR64S as well.
Highs:
Lows: