Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of S3 internal overclocking software, ATITool and our benchmarking suite. S3 was kind enough to provide an overclocking utility which works with all three clocks. PowerStrip is the only freely available tool, and it can overclock only the core.

S3's latest GPU is the first one to feature separate shader clocks, a system first seen on NVIDIA GPUs. It gives developers more freedom to tune the performance of the shader core.



The final overclocks of our card are 1023 MHz core (28% overclock) and 848 MHz Memory (6% overclock). The core overclock is simply amazing and shows that there is still a lot of potential left in the Chrome 400 GPU. The memory clock is slim, but that was to be expected from 1.2 ns memory. I don't see a reason why S3 couldn't make a faster card with around 1000 MHz core, slightly improved cooling and faster memory chips to break the Gigahertz barrier.

Temperatures

Due to the design of the thermal sensor inside the GPU, the lowest displayed temperature is 41.25°C, even if the temperature is actually lower. This severely limits enthusiasts from micro-managing their card's temperature. On the other hand there is no real reason why you would care if your card is 20°, 30° or 41.25°C.
Both the idle and load temperature are fine. I tried disconnecting the fan for a passive solution as well, but the card would quickly overheat once a 3D application is started.