Interesting! It's uncommon to see C7 builds here, let alone ones with the PCI Express S3 video cards.

This is really interesting. I'd like to see a direct comparison to it's GeForce and Ati Equivilents

Very original build, nice!

Hardly ever see anyone here use S3 Chrome or any VIA past C3.

I suppose the CPU is not socketed but soldered to the board?

matze79 wrote:

Here is my aproach to build a Non-Standart PC System.

Uncommon, yes, but every part is standard.

Source: https://logout.hu/cikk/s3_chrome_s25_es_s27/foszereplok.html

This is the S3 Chrome S25 - 512Mb DDR2

There is also a S27 Model featuring DDR3 Ram, i can't find one currently.
The GPU's also support Multichrome, you could plug multiple S3 Chrome Cards and they render together one Picture either each one one Picture or in Slices one Picture.
AFR and SFR is supported.

The S25 also supports deblocking and can apply filters to graphics output.
I will take some screenshots soon.

And the Mainboard:

A Viotech 3100+ from Biostar with underclocked 1,8Ghz CPU.
Its default to 1,6Ghz.
I'm pretty sure this is do keep temperatures in Range because of passiv cooling.
I simply apply a Fan later. But now its winter and the System keeps cool at 1,8Ghz 😀.

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduct … on.php?S_ID=470

In the Past it was popular in the bitcoin scene because it was cheaper then its intel atom equivalent and has a PCIe Slot.

Here is a 3DMark05 Professional run, default Setting.

I'm pretty sure the Chrome S25 is CPU bottlenecked with the C7.

Yes, it can do a bit faster..:

http://hwbot.org/submission/744399_furor_3dma … ddr2_3282_marks

EDIT:
Ok i see, the Chrome here is overclocked..

Running Crysis:

Something does prevent choosing medium, crysis crashes every time using any setting higher then low.

I remember reading about those S3 cards and the speculation that maybe S3 was gonna try to play with the big boys agian then nothing

This reminds me of my primary XP machine I had several years ago.
It also had a Biostar mainboard with the C7D. Despite beeing a single core, it worked quite well for most stuff.
I also had a S3 Chrome graphics card around that time (not sure whether I used it in this machine or not) - I bought it, because it had such a nice DVD playback acceleration! ^^
MPEG2 stuff, which went through that HW video decoder was well enhanced in terms of image quality (esp. macro blocks, motion compensation, etc.)
In that respect, the S3 was much better than any nVidia or ATI, I think. The only throwback for me was the lack of any Flash support (and the lack of Aero-capable drivers,btw)..
Around this time, Flash (v10.2,"Square"?) started to get its hardware acceleration feature for video playback (and drawing vector graphics).
It was the time when videos beyond 360p got more and more popular and HTML5 was quite slow and resource hungry.