Diamond Multimedia Stealth III S540 Xtreme

Diamond Multimedia was recently acquired by S3, so we can expect to see more Diamond Multimedia video cards featuring graphics chips by S3 in the future. Diamond Multimedia already offers one such video card, the Stealth III S540 Xtreme.

This video card uses S3’s Savage4 graphics chip. As we’ll see, Diamond Multimedia’s Stealth III S540 Xtreme isn’t quite as powerful as many of the other video cards we tested, but it’s also less expensive than the rest. It is an AGP 2X/4X card and comes with 32MB of SDRAM. It has the typical fast 300MHz RAMDAC, a maximum 2-D resolution of 1,920 x 1,440, and a maximum 32-bit color depth.

The Stealth III S540 Xtreme supports the Direct3D and OpenGL APIs and works with the Win9x and WinNT4.0 operating systems.

As soon as we ran our SYSMark 98 benchmark, it became clear where this video card’s strength lies. The Stealth III S540 Xtreme scorched the SYSMark 98 test, racking up an overall score of 187. Only 3dfx’s Voodoo3 3000 video card posted better numbers. The office productivity score was 187, and the content creation score clocked in at 186. We were pretty impressed.

The Stealth III S540 Xtreme didn’t handle the 3-D tests as well as the other video cards, however. We ran our Quake II test to measure the video card’s frame rate. At a resolution of 640 x 480, the Stealth III S540 has a frame rate of 82.5fps. This is a pretty good frame rate in general, but it was the second slowest we recorded out of the group, finishing just ahead of the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000. And the card really ran out of gas when we cranked up the resolution. When we tested at 1,024 x 768, the Stealth III only reached a frame rate of 35.6fps in OpenGL, the lowest frame rate at this resolution among the video cards we reviewed. That’s quite a drop-off.

Finally, we ran our 3D Mark benchmark. The Stealth III scored 3,046 on our test, which again dropped the Stealth III S540 Xtreme to dead last.

The Stealth III isn’t a firecracker of a video card. Its 3-D abilities lag behind other cards sporting the latest graphics chips from NVIDIA and 3dfx. Still, it has excellent 2-D performance and is cheaper than the other video cards on the market.
 

Back to Video Cards
By: Lacey