Many of you have probably heard something about the Trident XP4 graphics card.  You?ve probably heard that it will offer performance along the lines of a GeForce 4 Ti4200 for only $100.  It has been a while (a long while) since Trident first started boasting about the new card, and nothing has really turned up.  What has happened?  Well what was originally slated to be introduced in October of 2002 now has no certain date.  Trident?s XP4 is being manufactured on a .13 micron process by UMC.  Unfortunately for Trident, UMC has been having quite a bit of trouble with the move to the smaller process.  This problem as well as others has caused delays in Trident?s schedule.

 So what am I presenting you with today?  Quite simply, we are looking at an engineering sample XP4 with beta drivers.  That said, this preview of the XP4 will not show final performance assuming an eventual release.  The card that I have is clocked at 150/300.  The final T3 version of the XP4 is slated for a 250-300MHz core and 600-700MHz memory clock.  I?m assuming that this board is the T3 version since it boasts 128MB of RAM.   The T1 and T2 versions have only 64MB according to Trident.  I was unable to confirm with them which version of the card that I have however.  So as you can see, there is a large difference in clock speed between this sample board and the proposed final product.  Taking all of this into account, there is also some rework done to the board by hand.  With all this in mind, a final product should perform a lot better than what I have in my hands today, but unfortunately there will be much more competition for Trident in the targeted price range with all the new cards slated to be released within the next few months.

 Specifications:

• 150MHz Core Clock (Final Card - 250-300MHz)


• 150MHz DDR Memory Clock ? 300MHz Effective (Final Card ? 600-700MHz)


• AGP 4X


• VGA, DVI, Video-Out


• 128MB RAM


• DirectX 8.1 Support


• Tile-Based Rendering


• .13 Micron Process


• 4 Rendering Pipelines


• 2 Texture Units Per Pipeline

The Card:

Card Front

Card Back

VGA, DVI, S-Video Connectors

You can tell that the card is an engineering sample, there isn?t even an I/O plate covering the outputs.  There is also some rework on the board itself, and as mentioned earlier the Core/RAM isn?t up to speed.  The RAM is 4ns, meaning up to 500MHz (DDR) operation, but it?s running a full 200MHz slower at 300MHz on the current card.

Heatsink Closeup

 

RAM

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