Diamond S80 Video Card Review

Name: Diamond S80 Video Card Review - Page 5
Brand: Diamond

by HH Editor — Thursday, February 19, 2004, 06:48 PM EDT

Diamond Multimedia's Stealth S80
A legend returns to the graphics market

By Robert Maloney
February 15th, 2003

Overclocking the Diamond Stealth S80

You can't get something for nothing

Well, after seeing the relatively poor performance in these benchmarks, we hoped to squeeze out just a bit more performance by overclocking the card. We started by raising the memory clock speeds using the latest version of PowerStrip. Although we had expected to raise the speed to at least 200MHz before running into any issues (5ns memory rating should allow for speeds up to 200MHz) we were not able to add more than 1MHz before getting massive artifacting in any of our benchmarks. Switching gears, we set the memory back to its default speed and raised only the VPU core speed instead. It was a "no-go" here as well, since it appears that this is another clock-locked card. Using PowerStrip, we raised the core speed from 200MHz all the way to the max setting available (255MHz) with no discernible difference in the benchmarks. We didn't get any crashes or lock-ups, but we didn't get any increased performance either. Thus, we could not get any benefits from overclocking the Diamond Stealth S80 whatsoever.

Our final thoughts about the Stealth S80 are that you get what you pay for. It's not for lack of Diamond's manufacturing or expertise that the Stealth S80 suffered so - if anything, it simply fails because of the chipset that it was created on, that being the ATi Radeon 9200SE. The 9200SE is the lowest rung on ATi's graphics ladder, and doesn't hold up well against the competition (incidentally, Diamond also offers the Stealth S90, which is based on the 5200 Ultra and only sells for about $10 more.) Serious gamers will probably look elsewhere, but system builders looking for an inexpensive means for providing basic Windows acceleration and occasional gaming will have no issue with laying out $49 for the Diamond Stealth S80. We do expect for Diamond to show it's real brilliance with the upcoming Viper line of cards, based on more powerful GPUs, and will hopefully have more information on them in the future. As for the Stealth S80, we're giving it a 7 on the HotHardware Heat Meter...