SiS 33x series
Overclocker 17 Apr 2002

Background

nVIDIA and ATi has been challenging each other in producing more and more low cost high performance chipsets. This might change as SiS might make a come back soon. At CEBiT Germany, SiS displayed it's latest SiS 33x series of chipsets. With more competition in the market, we are bound to see more price/performance products real soon.

Today, our wait is over, we take a look at the world's first AGP 8X AGP card based on SiS336 chipset. This is Taiwan Triplex's engineering sample and it's also the first 33x product..

SIS 33x series product information

1. SiS 33X series includes SIS 328, SIS 332, SIS334, SIS 336. SIS328 is the lowest of the pyramid and it is an improved version of the SiS315 and supports 4x, uses SDR RAM. The other 3 models are revamped for better performance with 8x AGP support and uses high speed DDR RAM.

2. SIS 33x is named as Xabre. SiS328, SiS332, SiS334, SiS336 will be named as Xabre 80, Xabre 200, Xabre 400, Xabre 600. The technology specifications are laid out below :

The naming convention seems to look like nVIDIA. 200, 400 etc. SiS has a 600 series too. It seems that SiS is ready to capture the low-mid market of nVIDIA.  Xabre has built in SiS 301 hardware chipset and supports DVI and TV-Out. Other than Xabre 80 supports only 4x, the other 3 models support AGP 8x.

Triplex indicates that the future trends will be based on P4 high speed, high storage, high bandwidth multimedia. e.g. 533mhz CPU, AGP 8x, DDR 400. Thus it is timely to have an agp 8x standard. SiS has started cooperating with other mainboard manufacturer on these new standards.

SIS Xabre targets ...

Looks like SiS Xabre is comparable to NV17 and NV25, ATi RADEON series. Some of the products are even faster than the competitor's. It looks like SiS is looking for a share of the mid low range market. 

From the chart above, it is very clear what SiS Xabre is targetting which segment. Under the same platform, 3dMark2001 scores between 4000 and 7000. SiS Xabre 600(SIS 336) vs GF4 MX460、RV250, GF4 MX460 does not support DX8.01. SIS Xabre 400（SIS 334）vs GF4 MX440 and RADEON 7500D. Only SIS Xabre 400 supports Direct X8.01.

SIS Xabre Series products opportunities

From the diagram above, we can see that SIS Xabre200（SIS 332), GF4 MX420 and RADEON 7500S will share the same pie. SiS's weapon is DX 8.01 and it could be cheap. SiS315E will be slightly better than MX200 and Radeon 7000 and faster than integrated P4 chipset's 3D performance by 30%. To be able to target the low range market, SiS328 should be included too.

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