Future Power - Power Series P3-500

At first glance it seems like Future Power has selected the Diamond Viper V770 for their AGP video card, but upon closer inspection you realize that it isn't the TNT2 based card but, rather, the cheaper Diamond Stealth III S540 based on the Savage4 PRO+ chipset.

The Savage4 PRO+ is clocked at 125MHz core with a 125MHz memory clock but a brief experiment with PowerStrip proved the card capable of hitting 143MHz core and 166MHz memory effortlessly. The 143/166 setting ran fine for a few minutes in Quake 3 but the display would become corrupted upon entering Unreal Tournament. We had to drop the clock speed down to 143/143MHz to achieve reliable operation.  Speaking of Unreal Tournament, due to a bug in the current demo the Savage4 chipset is not detected correctly.  The Power Series system managed to start up the Unreal Tournament demo in D3D mode but performance was extremely slow and the demo would only run in a window. 

The card was installed using Diamond's Stealth III S540 drivers revision 2.04. Unfortunately, this driver revisions does not feature the Savage 4's OpenGL ICD and thus renders the system incapable of running OpenGL games right out of the box. Visiting Diamond's driver support page proved useless since revision 2.04 is the latest driver revision for the card, so the next move was to pay a visit to S3's drivers page.

The latest driver release from S3 outdates all of their beta drivers linked to on their site, and contained the OpenGL ICD, an unfortunate absence from the Diamond 2.04 drivers. Keep in mind that this means that until Diamond releases updated drivers for their Stealth III S540, if you want OpenGL support you'll be forced to use reference drivers and you'll lose Diamond's InControl Tools '99, a fairly useful set of tools for configuring and controlling your desktop/graphics environment.

The biggest complaint here is the selection of the Savage4 based S540 as the video card powering this "Power Series" system. If all you're going to be doing is running business applications, then the S540 is fine, but once games are factored into the equation then the S540 becomes less and less of an attractive option. Even if you're considering the Power Series system as a home theater replacement, the ATI Rage 128 would have been a much better alternative for DVD playback. The S540 as a video card was simply a poor choice on Future Power's behalf. We would definitely like to see a TNT2 or even a Voodoo3 used instead since both of those cards can be had for around the $100 mark and offer superior gaming performance while offering comparable 2D image quality and performance to the S540. 

For performance benchmarks of the Savage4 chipset in comparison to the competing chipsets visit our S3 Savage4 Review.