When SiS proudly announced the Xabre GPU, the industry expected to see it start appearing as a killer integrated graphics chipset. Many moons, and many slippages of product roadmaps later we see the first instance of an onboard Xabre, although not in the form we expected.
As part of volume mobo manufacturer extraordinaire, ECS’ push towards the gaming market it has created the Game Union 648 motherboard. This board uses the common SiS648 chipset but pairs it with a normal everyday Xabre200 chip and 64MB of dedicated DDR RAM. The trade off for this ‘video card on a motherboard’ arrangement is the loss of both the AGP slot and several PCI slots to make room for it, which decimates any upgrade paths for the board.
Xabre200 is a competent 3D performer but is designed as the bare minimum model of the Xabre range, and is notorious for having poor texture quality and generally disappointing 2D quality. However one aspect of the Xabre that does stand out is its TV-Out performance. In the lead up to this board arriving in the labs we had an idea that it would be a great board for a home theatre PC until we realised there was no TV-Out, just D-Sub.
Which makes us wonder just what market the Game Union 648 is aimed at? While the 3D performance is light years ahead of Intel’s Extreme graphics, it would only satiate a hardcore gamer for a short while, and any of us would think twice about buying a board with no VGA upgrade path. If gaming is irrelevant to your PC usage then it is tempting, but the i845GE is a much better option of chipset (and you don’t lose half your mobo real estate in the bargain).
While the concept is intriguing and the purple motherboard kinda cute, the Game Union 648 keeps falling just short of providing a capable solution for different PC users, making us wonder why anyone would bother?
Issue: 137 | June, 2012