XGI Volari V8 versus Deltachrome S8
Jon 7 Oct 2004

It seems that we just can't get enough of performance and power these days. However, many of you out there are not necessarily looking for the highest performance available, but rather for value. Most people want a cost effective videocard that performs well for their needs for moderate gaming. They could care less about competitive benchmarking scores. 

We have examined ATI and nVidia's mainstream solutions, and have also included mainstream solutions from both S3 and XGI. The cards we will be looking at are the ATI Radeon 9550, nVidia GeforceFX 5700LE, XGI Volari V8 and S3 Deltachrome S8. Though the S3 Deltachrome and the XGI Volari graphics cards are not readily available everywhere in the world, they can be found in certain parts of Europe and Asia and this is why the cards were included in this article.

The cards examined:

Volari V8 Specifications: 
• 128 MB DDR memory 
• 300MHz Engine Clock speed 
• 300 MHz Memory Clock speed 
• 400Mhz RAMDAC 
• 8 Pixel Pipelines (DirectX 9)
• Pixel/Vertex Shader 2.0 
• 128 bit Memory Interface
• Dual monitor Support, HDTV
• High Definition TV-OUT Solution with XV301chip
• Cipher Video Processor
• 9.6 Gb/sec bandwith

The Volari V8 comes with a nice cooling system which covers both the core and the memory. Though the cooling system may look a bit big, it actually is quite thin.

Deltachrome S8 Specifications: 
• 128 MB DDR memory 
• 300 MHz Engine Clock speed 
• 300 MHz Memory Clock speed 
• 400Mhz RAMDAC 
• 8 Pixel Pipelines (DirectX 9)
• Pixel/Vertex Shader 2.0 
• 128 bit Memory Interface
• Dual monitor Support, HDTV
• Chromotion Video Processor
• 9.6 Gb/sec bandwith

The Deltachrome comes with a nice red PCB which is reminescent of ATI cards. The core is cooled with a small fan and the memory chips are all covered with a nice heatsink.

If you look closely, you will see that both cards have very similar specs : clock speeds, memory bandwith, etc. That said, there are some points which strike out, such as XGI's TV-Out being able to output in high definition. Of course, both cards feature the usual DVI Connector, TV/Out, and VGA connector.

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