S3 Chrome S25 and S27 are the two latest graphic circuits to reach a, the least to say, hot market. Both ATi and nVidia has new circuits on the way but now it is S3’s time to shine. We have known about S3 and its work with the Chrome S20-family for a long time and now it has finally announced its new circuits. We reported recently about that S3 will use the 90nm manufacturing process Fujitsu supplies. This and the general design of the graphic circuits has made it possible for S3 to able to launch the highest clocked graphic processor on the market. S3 Chrome S27 namely works at 700MHz which even makes ATi Radeon X1800 XT look pale with its GPU-freuqnecy at 625MHz.
However the Chrome-series isn’t an attempt to threaten ATi and nVidia’s high end cards but focuses on low power consumption and nice features. According to S3 its Chrome S20-circuits offers the same performance as its competitors but at 50% less power.
Performancewise it seems the top model S27 will be up to par with nVidia’s low end GeForce 6600 which hardly lightning fast with today’s standards, but support for dual graphic cards through MultiChrome (any SLI or CrossFire-mainboard will work) and low prices S3 Chrome S20 might have a place on the market. So far there doesn’t seem to be many cards our for testing but at TechSpot they’ve published an article about S3’s new circuits.
“To me, visual quality is often more important than speed, especially when dealing with video and video playback. The S3 cards natively support various image-enhancing filters, such as the ability to vary the interlacing method used on screen at different spots, depending on what would look better.”
