First Impressions

Front of Xtreme S540

Back of the Xtreme S540

Front of normal S540

Back of the normal S540

The card

It's very hard to tell the difference between the Stealth III S540 Xtreme and the normal Stealth III S540. Both cards use the same board design, and we could only distinguish between the two by looking at the speed of the SDRAM or by flipping the cards over and looking at the product label. We also noticed that the normal Stealth III had a slightly larger heatsink and pale orange resistors.

6ns Xtreme SDRAM

8ns Xtreme SDRAM

The Memory

As you can see from our pictures above, our Stealth III Xtreme card has 6ns Hyundai SDRAM for the 166MHz memory clock. Our normal Stealth III only has 8ns Micron chips. We found this peculiar because the memory speed on the normal S540 is supposed to be 143MHz, but the 8ns chips are only rated up to 124MHz. Perhaps Diamond realized they could overclock the memory without any harmful consequences.

Installation

We plugged in the card, and powered up our test system. Windows 98 detected the card just fine, and we installed the 1.03 drivers included on our "Stealth III S540 Xtreme Release CD." We didn't bother installing Diamond's InControl Tools 99, because everyone knows that you're just asking for trouble if you install anything else besides the drivers from that Diamond installation CD. After a quick reboot, we were running around Q3A in no time.

No overclocking for now

We were looking forward to overclocking the Xtreme, but we couldn't find any good overclocking programs. The Xtreme's 166/166MHz clock maxed out Entech's Powerstrip program. The Powerstrip sliders were already set to the maximum rate under the Savage 4 settings and the 166MHz memory clock was even past Powerstrip's 143MHz limit.Then we tried S3Tweak, but the program doesn't have settings higher than 166/166MHz either.

*UPDATE*

Both Louis-Frédéric Michaud and our own Jeff Atwood have written in with information on how to readjust the minumum and maximum settings in Powerstrip. You can go into the pstrip.cfg file in the Windows directory, and adjust the settings for each individual card. Powerstrip has an entry for each card with the minimum, maximum, and default settings. Here's an example:

[Savage3D]
;--------------------S3 Savage3D/Savage4 (standard refresh rates)
MClk=90,225,110
MClk4=100,225,125
EClk=100,225,110
LUT=1

The first number is the minimum, the second is the maximum, and the third is the default setting. We changed all the maximum numbers to 225.

Still no overclocking

Well, we got Powerstrip to extend the sliders all the way up to 225, but we still couldn't get the program to apply the proper changes when we tried changing the settings. The core clock setting would jump to 319MHz when we tried applying any new core speed, and the memory clock wouldn't budge from 166. Guess we still have to wait.