2D, DVD & Overclocking

2D Performance

The 2D performance of this card was more than acceptable, thanks to it's 300MHz RAMDAC. With all of the current video cards providing more than adequate 2D performance, even with slower CPUs, no 2D benchmarking was performed.

Resolutions up to 1280x1024x32bpp were crisp and clear, but higher than that there was slight blurring of text (in particular white text on a black background).

Movies Anyone?

The S540 comes with Zoran's SoftDVD, which, while an OK DVD decoder, it's not the best. Performance with the bundled DVD software was acceptable (we prefer Quadrant International's (now RAVISENT Technologies) Software CineMaster^TM98).

The S540 provides a fairly robust hardware DVD decoding assist surpassed only by ATi's Rage 128 based graphics chips. In our tests CPU utilization never exceeded 38%. Output was clean and stutter free, with the exception of a miniscule (barely noticeable) pause when opening other applications. Color saturation was crisp and vivid and there was no artifacting or other corruption present. Overall, the S540's DVD performance was darn close to that of the ATi Rage Fury (which is as good as it gets without using a dedicated MPEG-2 decoder card).

With DVD performance this good, Diamond really missed the boat by not including at least a composite video out jack on the card. While this would have added to the bottom line, it probably would have given this card broader appeal to it's intended market (those looking to get a feature rich video card at a low price point).

Don't forget; if you're looking at getting the PCI version of the S540, with the hopes of getting some of this DVD goodness, you need to look elsewhere. With the PCI S540 you can forget about the hardware assisted DVD decoding features found on the AGP variant.

Faster, faster...

So, how does this card overclock? Well, without additional cooling, I was able to get this card to run rock solid with the core clocked to 150MHz and the memory clocked to 160MHz.. This was from the standard 125/143MHz speeds that the card is meant to run with. While I didn't include any benchmarks for the overclocked card, the numbers produced by the overclock settings on the card I reviewed were on average about 8-12% higher for D3D and 15-20% higher for OpenGL.

Remember, not all cards are created equal. You may not be able to achieve the same results when overclocking a different S540, then again, you may be able to achieve much better results.