First impressions and overclocking

Pictures

Where's the fan?

Viper II Z200

The back

The first thing you notice about the card is that it doesn't have a fan. While cards such as the GeForce and Rage Fury MAXX need fans, the Savage2000 chip only needs a heatsink thanks to the 0.18 manufacturing process and low clock speed. The chip runs cool with just the heatsink. While running through the Quake 3 benchmarks, the heatsink never reached a too-hot-to-handle temperature.

The SDRAM

The RAM

Our review card uses 32MB of Samsung 6ns KM432S2030C SDRAM which suggests that we might be able to get the 155MHz memory clock up to 166MHz.

DVD Performance

We hooked up our Pioneer 6X DVD to the benchmark system to test out the DVD playback. We first tried the Zoran SoftDVD player on the Celeron 300A. Yes, it's an unfair first test, but we just wanted to see how chunky "Desperado" would run. Playback was about what we expected with dropped frames everywhere. We overclocked the processor to 450MHz, and tried again. The playback quality improved quite a bit, but we did notice a few slight hiccups. Playback was flawless on our P3-600. The Viper's DVD playback should be acceptable on processors in the 500MHz range.

Overclocking

Our overclocking results were very surprising. We started work on the 125MHz engine clock first. We increased the clock in 5MHz increments because we didn't really expect to go past 140MHz. 130MHz went by without a problem, 135MHz passed just as easily, 140MHz? No sweat. 145MHz came and went, as did 150MHz. 155MHz? No problem. At this point we started to wonder if S3 gave us a "golden" chip for reviewers. Eventually we reached 175MHz, but stability problems pushed us back to 166MHz -pretty impressive overclock for a chip with a 125MHz default speed.

We had a better idea of what to expect with the memory. The 6ns rating told us that 166MHz should be a given, and our previous experiences with other 6ns SDRAM had us expecting maximum speeds between 175MHz and 183MHz. We managed to push the mclock all the way up to 183MHz. The memory wasn't stable at 195MHz and 188MHz. Wow, our Viper II was able to reach 166/183MHz (core/memory) from the 125/155MHz default.

We can't give you any benchmark numbers off the overclocked chip because all the programs we use for benchmarks reset the video card's settings on startup. We were able to test stability by running Quake 3 in a window and adjusting the video card settings after the game loaded.

We couldn't get Q3 fullscreen with the overclocked card because if we alt-tab-ed back to the desktop to adjust the video card settings, Q3 would grey-screen when we tried getting back into the game. Also, if you switched to full screen from the windowed setting the timedemos would give the windowed scores.