Diamond Multimedia Stealth S100 and S110

Name: Diamond Multimedia Stealth S100 and S110 - Page 2
Brand: Diamond

by Jason Gibson — Wednesday, May 19, 2004, 03:00 PM EDT

Specifications / Bundle of the S110 and Drivers

The bundle for the S110 is exactly the same as the S100's, with the obvious difference being the different card. One driver CD, one copy of Spy Hunter, one S-Video cable, a small pile of paperwork and the 7 day trial of NITRO5x were all there...

Specifications & Features of the Diamond Stealth S110

Another Four Banger, But With A Bit of Nitro...

GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGY

Radeon 9200 Visual Processing Unit (VPU)
Core Clock Speed 250MHz

MEMORY CONFIGURATION

256MB of DDR RAM
189MHz DDR
64-bit Memory Interface

FEATURES

CHARISMA ENGINE™ II

Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second
High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine
Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects

SMARTSHADER TECHNOLOGY

Full support for DirectX ? 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware
1.4 pixel shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass
Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
1.1 vertex shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions
Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL ? via extensions
Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles

SMOOTHVISION 2.1

Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ? applications
Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes
Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact

HYPER Z III+

Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%

VIDEO FEATURES

FULLSTREAM™ Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams
VIDEO IMMERSION™ II delivers industry-leading DVD playback
Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage
Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques
YUV to RGB color space conversion
Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback
4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering
Upscaling and downscaling
Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide
Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems
Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics

VIDEOSHADER

Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
Noise removal filtering for captured video

DISPLAY FEATURES

Dual integrated display controllers to drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
HYDRAVISION™ software provides complete control over multi-display configurations with a user-friendly interface
400MHz Dual integrated DACs with 10-bit per channel palette
Integrated DVI-compliant 165MHz TMDS transmitter
Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024x768 resolution

GENERAL FEATURES

Comprehensive 4X and 8X AGP support
Windows? Logo Program compliant
Optimized for Pentium ? 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow! processor instructions
Highly optimized 128-bit 2D engine with support for new Windows? XP GDI extensions

	Core Clock	Pixel Pipes	File Rate	Memory Clock	Memory Bus	Memory Bandwidth
Stealth S110	250MHz	4	1.0MP/s	189MHz	128	6.4GB/s

The Stealth S110 is a fairly streamlined card which is constructed on a standard green PCB Board. Just as the S100, the S110 uses a passive cooling system to keep the 9200 VPU below the melting point. In this case, Diamond decided to stray away from the use of spring loaded clips and instead used thermal epoxy to attach the sink to the VPU. Thus, we did not remove heatsink to expose the VPU. On the plus-side, the use of epoxy has eliminated the rocking issue that was present on the S100, but this has also presented a small inconvenience for those who wish to alter Diamonds cooling solution. Although, we doubt anyone would be buying one of these cards with the intent to modify it.

Overall, the build quality of the S110 seemed on par to the S100. Even under close inspection we where unable to find any loose components or excess solder on the board. The inclusion of DVI, VGA and S-Video outputs, gives the user a multitude of connectivity options, which will ensure the Stealth suits all of their needs. Also, for those who live in Europe, Diamond has conveniently incorporated a single jumper to switch the S-Video output from NTSC to PAL (please refer to lower right picture). Unfortunately we did not have a means of testing this feature with a PAL television, but Diamond ensures us it works well.

The Driver: Catalyst 4.4

The "Key" To Success...


Display Selection	Display Attributes	Display Adjustments	Display Advanced

SMARTGART	Direct3D	OpenGL	VPU Recovery

Color	Options	Rotation	Overlay

Bringing the features of both the S100 and S110 together and incorporating them into the OS is ATi's CATALYST Driver suite. The recent release of v.4.4 resolved a multitude of issues with popular game titles (Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, MS Flight Simulator 2004, Far Cry, etc...) and various hiccups with desktop applications (Windows Media Player, etc...). Though this build did not lend any increase in performance to the S100 and S110, it did resolve some possible abnormalities with some of our benchmark programs. All in all, v.4.4, and v4.5 which was released while we were in the process of writing this review, will ultimately aid newer cards, such as the x800, which can take full advantage of DX 9.x.