X-bit labs

Diamond Multimedia Expands Stealth Graphics Cards Family.

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/16/2004 | 12:31 PM ]

Diamond Multimedia, a legendary company who returned into the PC components market in late 2003, today announced the expansion of its Stealth product family intended for customers in budget.

Two new offerings from Diamond are Stealth S110 and Stealth 100 based on RADEON 9200 and RADEON 9600SE graphics processors from ATI Technologies respectively. The Stealth 110 is equipped with 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory, D-Sub, DVI and TV outputs, but is only capable of DirectX 8.1 effects. The Stealth 110 fully supports DirectX 9.0, features 128MB of 64-bit DDR SDRAM memory as well as D-Sub, DVI and TV outputs.

The two new cards will have suggested retail price points of $139.95 and $129.95 for the respectively for Stealth 110 and Stealth 100 and will begin to appear on the shelves of the US retailers starting from the 22^nd of March, 2004.

According to benchmarks of certain analysts, 256MB of on-board memory do not bring any substantial performance improvements on graphics cards powered by RADEON 9200 GPUs. RADEON 9600SE-powered products should also commonly deliver better performance and feature-set compared to RADEON 9200-based offerings.

The refresh of the Stealth lineup brings generally higher price-points to Diamond. Initially the company concentrated on value offerings at below $100. Currently the firm ships Diamond Stealth S90, Diamond Stealth S80, Diamond Stealth S70 and Diamond Stealth S60 graphics cards priced from $49.99 to $99.99. By enabling higher price-points Diamond may possibly reflect better market acceptance of its products.

Diamond Multimedia was among the first companies to employ a GPU neutral strategy and will continue this going forward, according to Diamond's recently proposed strategy. The company selects graphic processors for each product based on performance, features, quality, and price.

Diamond Multimedia plans to re-launch its Diamond Viper brand of high-performance graphics cards in May 2004, according to the company’s statement. The firm does not elaborate on the details of those graphics cards.