SPQQKY
11-04-2002, 03:46 AM
Hey all,
Thought I'd show a little light on a graphics card from someone other than nVidia or ATi. I recently picked up a Triplex Xabre Pro with the Xabre 400 gpu. It has 64MB of 3.5ns DDR. Out of the box, it's a nice looking card, the silver pcb looks great and would really shine on a Soyo Platinum with a window modded case. The hsf wasn't to shabby, with thermal paste between the core and hsf instead of that annoying tape. There are no ramsinks on this card.
As soon as I installed the card in my system with the latest drivers from the Triplex website, I ran a quick 3DMark on my normal OS install and got a decent score of 7209. I then tried the overclocking utility provided by Triplex and it was a joke, you can only add or subtract 10% from the core and memory. I first tried to up the memory 10%, bringing it from 500MHz DDR to 550MHz, instant blue and green squiggles and a needed reboot. This obviously was a waste of time. I then installed Powerstrip and began OCing the card with that. The best I could muster from the card with stock cooling was 265/520 without artifacts. I was running my system still at my every day settings of 166x10.5 (1750) and memory 166 Turbo 2-2-5-2 1T. I managed a score of 7549 (http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4909093) giving me the fastest Xabre/AMD rig on the Orb. Not to shabby for using a dirty WinXP and mild system OC.
I then decided to try and get the highest Xabre score on the Orb period, which was only 7879 with a P4 at 2.7Ghz. Unfortunately, my Yamaha CD burner died and I spent my spare time trying to get that resolved.
The card was all in all not to bad, though from the compare link, you can see it's hardware DX8.1 support is a little weak. If you are looking for a budget card in the $80 range, you really can't go wrong, the drivers for the card were very "light", with no AA, vsync or quality or performance settings. You can get supported or performace drivers from SiS' website. I thought, no AA settings was rediculous, but discovered that they needed to be set with a tool SiS calls 3D Wizard, it is not available for downlaod from the SiS website, but I found it on the CD provided by Triplex, which was listed under the driver option and not utilities...kinda confusing as I didn't think it was there are first.
At frist the card seemed disappointing, but after messing with it a while, I found it to be a good card for the $.
Thought I'd show a little light on a graphics card from someone other than nVidia or ATi. I recently picked up a Triplex Xabre Pro with the Xabre 400 gpu. It has 64MB of 3.5ns DDR. Out of the box, it's a nice looking card, the silver pcb looks great and would really shine on a Soyo Platinum with a window modded case. The hsf wasn't to shabby, with thermal paste between the core and hsf instead of that annoying tape. There are no ramsinks on this card.
As soon as I installed the card in my system with the latest drivers from the Triplex website, I ran a quick 3DMark on my normal OS install and got a decent score of 7209. I then tried the overclocking utility provided by Triplex and it was a joke, you can only add or subtract 10% from the core and memory. I first tried to up the memory 10%, bringing it from 500MHz DDR to 550MHz, instant blue and green squiggles and a needed reboot. This obviously was a waste of time. I then installed Powerstrip and began OCing the card with that. The best I could muster from the card with stock cooling was 265/520 without artifacts. I was running my system still at my every day settings of 166x10.5 (1750) and memory 166 Turbo 2-2-5-2 1T. I managed a score of 7549 (http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4909093) giving me the fastest Xabre/AMD rig on the Orb. Not to shabby for using a dirty WinXP and mild system OC.
I then decided to try and get the highest Xabre score on the Orb period, which was only 7879 with a P4 at 2.7Ghz. Unfortunately, my Yamaha CD burner died and I spent my spare time trying to get that resolved.
The card was all in all not to bad, though from the compare link, you can see it's hardware DX8.1 support is a little weak. If you are looking for a budget card in the $80 range, you really can't go wrong, the drivers for the card were very "light", with no AA, vsync or quality or performance settings. You can get supported or performace drivers from SiS' website. I thought, no AA settings was rediculous, but discovered that they needed to be set with a tool SiS calls 3D Wizard, it is not available for downlaod from the SiS website, but I found it on the CD provided by Triplex, which was listed under the driver option and not utilities...kinda confusing as I didn't think it was there are first.
At frist the card seemed disappointing, but after messing with it a while, I found it to be a good card for the $.