After all the hype of the upcoming "high-end" graphics cards, we feel that we should also look into the important area of the low and medium ranged graphic boards. Not everyone can afford the higher price tag on most of the big performers out in the market right now so we felt it was time to bring you word of one of the new players in the price/performance oriented market. The main competitors of the S540 Xtreme in my opinion are NVIDIA M64 based cards, i752 graphics boards, Voodoo3 2000, and products with the ATI Rage 128 chip. We also included the results of some of the more expensive top dogs into the review to provide an idea where the performance of these medium range graphics boards sit.

What's So Cool About The S540 Xtreme?

Most of us are familiar with Savage4 based graphics products. We talked about the Diamond Stealth III S540 in our huge "32 Graphic Card Meltdown - Part One" and "Part Two" . Basically, the only difference between the S540 and the S540 Xtreme is the core & memory clocks.

How much does the 41 MHz increase to the Savage4 core clock and the additional 23 MHz frequency in the memory clock affect performance? Let's look at our game benchmark test suite and find out. Even though the core clock has changed the temperature of the graphics chip isn't affected much. We measured only a 4C difference between the S540 and S540 Xtreme. The S540 measured 64C while the S540 Extreme's temperature hit 68C.