by Anna Filatova
07/16/2002 | 11:04 PM
Wow, what a company is going to join the team of SiS Xabre 400 supporters! This is ASUS, the major partner of NVIDIA Company, which has always been very nervous about the loyalty of its partners. You may remember, that there used to be some rumors about ASUS planning to make ATI based graphics cards, however, very soon they were all ruined by the official announcement made by the company’s chairman of the board of directors. NVIDIA might have been really nervous then.
Of course, I believe that ASUS nevertheless manufactured the cards, though not to be sold under their company brand name but according to a certain contract, but there had been so much stir around it then! :) And as for SiS, NVIDIA doesn’t seem to regard it as a serious competitor that is why they close their eyes to ASUS’ partnership with this company. In the meanwhile, at least…<%BANNER[article]%>
However, the introduction to the actual story seems to have turned out too long :) let’s have a closer look at the card itself (the pictures are available here). The card is marked as X4000 (as usual, ASUS uses 4-digit model numbers).
The most remarkable thing about the card is the memory chips. Firstly, they are 64mbit (4Mx16, 3.3V), so that they had to use 8 of them to reach the desired 64MB. Secondly, they are 3.3ns ones, which indicates that they support 600MHz DDR frequency. As is known, only Xabre 600 is supposed to have fast memory like that (the chip is due within this quarter). And Xabre 400 based cards should come with 4ns memory working at 500MHz DDR by default. So, this decision of ASUS’ is really outstanding and pleasing at the same time.
Unfortunately, this pleasure might be spoilt by the high price of the novelty, especially, since there are 8 fast chips onboard, which is more than enough. Nothing to do: this is the company’s pricing policy.
And now we should only find out when ASUS X4000 is to come to the market and have every right to state that there are 5 manufacturers liking SiS chips in Taiwan now: Elitegroup, AOpen, Acorp, C.P. Technology (PowerColor) and ASUS.