I had a 64MB Xabre 400 back when they had just come out. I was a poor student at the time and was scraping pennies together for an upgrade.

This was back in the day when Geforce 3 was king. I had a mate with more money than sense and he was mad keen to get a GF3. He rings me one day and says he's found a 'killer card'. It was the Xabre. I'd already read the reviews and they didn't seem that great, but he thought he was getting a full GF3 featureset for about $200 AU (GF3 Ti 200 was $300 and up)

Then he got it and it would not boot in his system. Apparently they were totally incompatible with the VIA KT333 chipset. I was running an ECS K7S5A at the time and offered to buy the card off him. It worked in the SIS 735 chipset motherboard. So I stuck with it for about 6 months. It was better than the TNT2 Vanta I was using which was a hand-me-down from my old Pentium 2 box.

It was marketed as a DX8 card but the pixel/vertex shaders never really worked properly.
I remember trying to play Morrowind with it, it wasn't for a good few driver revisions until the pixel shaded water started working (The option in the launcher was greyed out until these drivers were released). I tried it and it worked, but was basically unplayable, the game was a slideshow with them enabled.
I was a member of 'XabreGamers', a forum which seems to have been as short lived as the cards themselves. I got into a heated debate with one individual who called me a 'framerate whore' for suggesting that Morrowind was unplayable with the shaders enabled. The game was barely cracking 20FPS outside with the shaders off, but when they were on it was closer to 5FPS.
I don't see how 'framerate whore' and Xabre belong in the same sentence... but I digress.

The Xabre also had terrible mipmapping/texture filtering, there was noticable banding across the terrain in all my games where obviously lower quality textures were being used. Terrain approaching the horizon looked like a soupy mess. You could turn this off in the driver but it made the game absolutely chug.

The terrible K7S5A died a few months laters and I bought a KT333 board and a GF4 Ti4200 to go with it, and Morrowind's framerates were closer to 30FPS with shaders enabled.

I sold the Xabre to another mate with a GF2 MX200 who mainly wanted to play Operation Flashpoint, and it did alright at that (better framerate than the MX200 anyway).

I have never bought a 'Shit in Silicon' product since. 😀

A lot of vintage cards really aren't suitable for actual use (many of them weren't suitable when they were new) but only as collectibles. I haven't started looking seriously into SiS dedicated cards but they will be on my buy list one day. There's too many other cards I want first.

My only recent exposure to SiS was a Mirage IGP in a Sempron notebook. DirectX 8 but probably as fast as a Geforce 256 at best. Very useless for Linux because the driver development went nowhere.

And I've witnessed firsthand the uselessness of SiS 530 and 6326. Well for 3D anyway. 😁

They are ok for Windows 2D.

Typical SiS drivers, and unfortunately, those (lack of) driver-writing skills carried over into the XGI Volari cards. I considered a Xabre back in the day as a cheap alternative to the GeForce4/Radeon 8500, but its lack of anisotropic filtering support really killed it for me. But hey, you gotta give them credit for releasing the first consumer-level AGP 8x-capable board (even though around its first release, there were very almost no motherboards on the market that supported AGP 8x).

Surely there were much faster cards then 6326, but there were lots of even worse too. Xabres were facing GeForces 4MX and Radeons 9000. Turn off turbotexturing and they will often hold their own. Yes, the pixel shader is painfully slow, but it was not a necessity yet. Vertex shader is emulated only, but it can be run efficiently on cpu, so no big deal and it is DX8 compliant. SiS was last company that jump onto 3D PR buzz and went overboard with Xabre. I would prefer if they just kept those anonymous numbers, it is more cool to me.
And k7s5a is the best motherboard ever made, what a bliss for social desperados like I was. My crystal+volt modded one with mobile barton is still working, I can test so many things on it. All the chipsets from 2001 on were great and remained low cost.
Guess I have a thing for ambitious small companies. Am I biased much?

One thing to mention: the 6326 produces pretty nice image quality in Turok. For a card that was probably never tested by the developers, that's a pretty awesome feat, when many other cards at the time (specifically non-Voodoo) had some serious compatibility issues. Heck it almost looks as good as the Voodoo running in D3D mode. It's just too bad it's painfully slow though.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accele … step,51-33.html

And k7s5a is the best motherboard ever made, what a bliss for social desperados like I was. My crystal+volt modded one with mobile barton is still working, I can test so many things on it. All the chipsets from 2001 on were great and remained low cost.

🤣. that's the thing, when I was researching it I'd come across so many people who were adamant that it was brilliant but there were just as many people who said it was cheap and nasty and had issues with it. I took a gamble on it and lost. Given the high level of controversy I can't recommend it for anyone. In hindsight an A7A-266 would have been a better choice (Asus board with SDRAM and DDR slots). However the cheaper price drew me to the ECS board which proved to be a mistake.

Mine lasted less than a year before totally dying. Before that I'd had intermittent cold boot issues as well (fans would spin but its would never POST - a similar problem reported by many other users).
One theory I remember reading was that ECS had a couple of different factories and one wasn't as stringent with its QC as the others, which lead to problems like cold solder joints etc on a large majority of boards on the market being substandard quality. Regardless of whether its true or not it doesn't instill confidence in their products. AS far as 'best motherboard ever made' IMHO K7S5A is WELL down the bottom of that list 😉

After the K7S5A I upgraded to an A7V333 and never had a problem. Been using Gigabyte and Asus motherboards since.

Putas wrote:

Surely there were much faster cards then 6326, but there were lots of even worse too

You mean....there exists a graphics card on this earthly plane that's *gasps* even slower?!?!?
Surely, 6326 must be teh slowest AGP card ever made?? 🤣

@Donutking
The problems you're describing also sounds like bad caps, but I guess you already made sure that wasn't the problem. But bad solder joints...that's really bad. Very poorly made boards 🙁

I did not measured games yet, just played a few and 6326 seems faster and higher IQ then Virge GX2 or Rage IIc for example. At least on my Duron 650 system, I want cpu unlimited results first. There is some performance range between 50 MHz EDO and 100 MHz SGRAM boards.

Yes there were often cold boot issues. I know all the other weaknesses as well, I fell in love with it threw overcoming it, what a ride. I think k7s5a is the best board prices consider, I don't know another board slashing prices like this one while being a top perfomer. Many boards of quality brands are being manufactured in ECS factories since then. Not sure about working conditions, hopefully better then Foxcon.

@Donutking
The problems you're describing also sounds like bad caps, but I guess you already made sure that wasn't the problem. But bad solder joints...that's really bad. Very poorly made boards

Pretty sure there were no bad caps- visibly anyway. The board wasn't even a year old- this is back when the Palomino was the latest and greatest and I bought the board brand new. I've found most bad caps take a few years of regular use before they go dodgy.
I threw the board out years ago so I can't check to be sure.

I am done testing 6326. The fastest model I have, Diamond A50, is really about one third of Voodoo performance. Geometry is rather fast, must be bad fillrates. I think the drivers are strong part of this one, the only games out of the ~40 tested that really failed were Expandable and because of unfinished ogl ICD also quake III and sin crashes and return fire 2 even freezed pc. Strange thing is first quake works quite well with s3 virge wrapper and is a bit faster then it's own opengl driver from 1.26 beta. Overall solid IQ, sometimes appears dithered alpha and fog looks lame.

I also have a passively cooled SiS 305 card which can be overclocked to 182/162, really like that one.

DonutKing wrote:

@Donutking
The problems you're describing also sounds like bad caps, but I guess you already made sure that wasn't the problem. But bad solder joints...that's really bad. Very poorly made boards

Pretty sure there were no bad caps- visibly anyway. The board wasn't even a year old- this is back when the Palomino was the latest and greatest and I bought the board brand new. I've found most bad caps take a few years of regular use before they go dodgy.
I threw the board out years ago so I can't check to be sure.

You know caps can fail even without it being visually apparent 😉

And anyway, ECS is on my list of motherboard brands to avoid (only PC0Chips scores lower).

You know caps can fail even without it being visually apparent

Pretty sure there were no bad caps- visibly anyway.

Bump because I took some screenshots of SiS 651........ 😳 X_X 😵 DX

been using a sis661 board in my office before... all i can say is 3d performance sux, 3dmark01 at ~1800 points which is on par with a tnt2pro.
the other intergrated 3dcard that i used, an intel 915, performed much better and scored 5000 points which is comparable to a geforce2.

Those have SiS315 core. So they did not fix the bilinear filter, shame.

I've noticed it only switches to that weird approximated filter if the VRAM is mostly used up. In my case in this game it only appeared when I ran this in 1024x768 at picmip 0

Also, RGB4 is not supported.

It's 16-bit dithering looks pretty good though compared to other cards, including the GeForce line. 😮

I've just built a system with SiS 671FX. IGP is Mirage 3, which I suppose is Volari architecture. Damn it is slow, drivers are minimalistic and not very compatible. Biggest letdown is I cannot get proper refresh rates in games under Windows XP.