We've seen plenty of video cards from nv (84xx) and amd (hd34xx) with 64bit memory width and GDDR3...s3 made GDDR3 for 540 gtx just similar to what they did for 440 gtx. A faster memory is adopted to feed the over-clocked graphics engine in order to boost the performance. By calculation, a 64bit is enough to bring the targetted performance and a 64bit design can keep the memory controller logic in small size and thus reduce the gate count of the chip and its cost!!Can INQR make a review of it?

LOL why didn't they just leave DDR2 there? .. . . . . . . .. . . . paragraph buggggg!!!

fix the damn paragraph bug INQUIRERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

For a product not-yet or will never in mass production, it's meaning less to consider its price. what's more important is if they can deliver latest technologies with their product. Before 540 gtx, Display-port is the only thing S3 hadn't shown off with its products. For the question if it can deliver audio through the HDMI port? The answer is absolutely YES. And besides this, S3 has demonstrate they can provide latest connection solutions - PCI-E Gen2, HDMI 1.3 and now Displayport 1.1, and can support latest graphics standards - OpenGL 3.0 and DirectX 10.1 and DirectX 11 in near future, and can also provide leading-edge multimedia solution - dual stream Blue-ray, H.264, etc. and have other technologies like Multi-chrome(MGPU solution), PowerWise(Power-saving technology), GPGPU solution and so on. I think it should be apprieciated for being always catching up with the latest technologies. As for the driver, our old users had a bad memory of it in era of Savage...but I can say with my own experiences with 400 that its driver support is far better now. Nothing is perfect, bugs always come out under millions of tests, this's what S3's lacking of today, given its limited user base. So, why not stay and see what they will provide in DX11 era.

agree withh Diante.
s3 is now a new company with new mindset. It's quite obvious that they are now focusing on the entry level market, trying to provide products with affortable gaming and good video experience, and low power of coz. However, they need more products to demonstrate themselves, 400/500 should be a good attemp but too late to hit the market, and thus miss a good chance. I personally think they won't enter the realm dominated by AMD/NV abruptly unless they've proven its success in the segment which they are now focusing. They need more power-effienct design-wins, for which advanced manufacturing process and better architecture are both required.

I got my Palit ATI HD4670 Super 512MB for about $85. It comes with DVI, HDMI, VGA and Displayport at the back of the card and has a nice, big cooling solution.

Why in the world would I want to buy something that's just $14 cheaper, has much less performance 3D, has untested drivers, and who knows what else? And by the way, does S3 include audio output in its HDMI implementation the way ATI does?

Gpu clock says nothing about computing power, they obviously made a low power chip, more memory bandwidth will do almost nothing to improve performance on a chip with so few paralel threads.

I keep wondering, if S3 can put out an 800 MHz graphics processor, why can't they just use that power to a better potential? I mean S3 could see how good it could be with it's cards, maybe go discount for all it's series of cards except for a testbed one for gamers that actually tries to compete against ATI and nVidia. S3 should try to become part of a three part fight unless they want to become doomed to obscurity.

Why dont they just give up?

...cock-ups at leInq, where hacks forgot what they learned in Journalism 101.

According to the company's graphics illustrators, the card is a bit of everything rolled up into one: it does HD Video playback with less CPU usage than an 8600GT, it scores the same as an HD 3450 in Vista+3DMark2006... wait a minute. It does exactly the same thing as a Chrome 530GT. That can't be right, can it? Well, it seems the S3 sales people just copy&pasted the performance graphs from the 530 GT into the 540 GTX page, even though there's some serious

lets try to finish our sentances from now on when we