Board layout

Our S8 reference board from S3 was dated August 2003, so chances are the final boards will look much different than the board you’re looking at today. The board layout itself is spartan, more so than even ATI’s RADEON 9600 PRO. This was pretty surprising to us, considering the specs DeltaChrome supports, but all goes back to the low power requirements of TSMC’s 0.13-micron process as well as S3’s modest transistor count, despite the eight pixel pipelines.

Our board is fairly old

S8 back plate

Spartan board design

The board is sprinkled with capacitors and voltage regulator modules, which reiterates the low power requirements of the DeltaChrome graphics core. Remember that this is board that shares a common ancestry with the mobile market.

Our power connector is crooked

S3 S8 prototype board

Back of the card

As you can see, the edge of the board has a floppy power connector, but this isn’t required for operation with S8. Only F1 models need this power connection, but rather than build two boards, S3 left it on there for the S8 prototype card. You’ll also notice the BGA memory modules, they’re built by Samsung and good for 650MHz. We’ll probably dabble with overclocking our S8 board a little later to see how high these modules on our board can go.

Like NVIDIA, Silicon Image’s Sil 164CT64 DVI transmitter is used for the DVI connection while the output on the card’s backplate can be used to hook the card up to an HDTV, or your regular television.

Silicon Image transmitter

Same Samsung modules as the AIW 9600

A closer look at the coole

As far as cooling is concerned, our S8 card came with a small Orb-style cooler that was very quiet. Board temperatures were quite good, even during extended testing sessions the card would barely get warm. This suggests that DeltaChrome could be an excellent solution for small form-factor applications (especially when you factor in the multimedia prowess this card boasts). In fact, S3 claims passive cooling should be enough to cool slower S4 cards.

S3 is playing a pretty active role in the board design, just like ATI and NVIDIA with their high-end boards. In particular we hope that they set some type of standard on the board’s output circuitry. The DeltaChrome chip includes dual 400MHz 10-bit DACs, so that should help somewhat, but we’d hate to see the sharp 2D visuals present on our reference board degenerate into an atrocious display output on a $70 S4 card.

Two board designs are available for DeltaChrome, a six-layer 8”x4” BGA PCB (the one pictured here) and a four-layer 8”x4” TSOP design.