The Card

The S540 is a very clean and well layed out board that propagates Diamond's reputation for making boards that are well constructed and have a look and feel of quality in general.

You can see where Diamond saved on production costs by not including the components on this card that would make it a very exceptional product. The missing parts would give this card digital flat panel display support and composite video out (which would've really been nice, considering the good DVD support this card has).

Diamond chose to drop the "bells and whistles" features of this card to keep it in line with the Stealth series' target consumers, budget shoppers who are looking for a balance between price and performance.

Cooling for the Savage 4 Pro+ chip is taken care of by a large heatsink. No need for a fan, as this passive cooling set up is more than adequate for the .25 micron silicon chip, even when overclocked.

The card comes out of the box set up for AGP 2x. For AGP 4x use, the card requires the installation of 3 jumper caps (included) on 3 separate sets of jumper pins (would've been a nicer touch to only have to install one jumper, but, no matter...AGP 4x performance was not evaluated, as we had no motherboard capable :( of it.)