S3 Savage 2000 (Diamond Viper II)

Unlike the competition, S3 is producing the Savage 2000 on a 0.18-micron fabrication process. NVIDIA is using a 0.22-micron process with their GeForce and 3dfx is making use of an enhanced 0.25-micron process. So, how is it that S3 can be at 0.18-micron while the two competitors aren’t?

It turns out that S3’s Savage 2000 isn’t completely 0.18-micron, rather a hybrid 0.18/0.22 micron solution. The move to true 0.18-micron will eventually occur, but for now only the transistors on the Savage 2000 are based on the 0.18-micron process, the rest of the chip is 0.22-micron. According to S3/Diamond, this hybrid technology has no downsides, but it seems odd that the hybrid construction would be just as good as a true 0.18-micron solution.

Because at least the transistors of the chip are based on the 0.18-micron design, it is very likely that the Savage 2000 will be a pretty good overclocker. The Diamond Viper II, the first Savage 2000 based video card, ships without a fan because of this. Adding a fan would probably allow for a fairly successful overclock on the Savage 2000 chip itself. Don’t expect anything like a 125MHz to a 200MHz overclock, but reaching at least 150MHz shouldn’t be a difficult task to accomplish. Unfortunately, at the time of publication, the only overclocking utility we had was built into the InControl Tools 99, which did not report the overclocked frequencies. We can only assume, judging by the way the Viper V770 Ultra's InControl Tools 99 worked, that each "Turbo Boost" setting increased the core frequency by 5MHz. At boost level 5 (or 150MHz core, the memory frequency is not adjusted) our Viper II crashed after a few timedemo runs, but adding a fan onto the heatsink that covered the Savage 2000 eliminated that problem. Boost level 4 (145MHz) ran perfectly fine without any added cooling.

Our Diamond Viper II sample featured 6ns SDRAM which would allow for a 166MHz memory clock (equal to that of the GeForce, but above the 155MHz rating of the board). From our experience with the memory in specific, it wouldn’t be absurd to be able to hit ~170MHz with the memory. Once again, we did not have an overclocking utility capable of pushing the memory frequency, but, in the future, one should be available.