DFI Xabre 400 T3

DFI's Xabre 400 T3 is based on the Sis Xabre 400 chip. The chip (and therefore the card) is a direct competitor to Nvidia's Geforce4 MX440.

The Xabre 400 chip was the first graphics chip to be AGP 8x compliant, even though at that time there were no motherboards available that supported the technology.

Since the Xabre 400's release, Nvidia has added AGP 8x support to its Geforce4 MX range and there are now plenty of motherboards that are AGP 8x compatible.

We tested the Xabre 400-T3 back to back with an Asus V9180 MX440 with AGP 8x support, which sells for about £90 inc VAT. Xabre 400 is DirectX 8.1 compliant where MX440 is only compatible with DirectX 7.

The £73 Xabre 400-T3 has 128MB of memory. DFI is also selling a 64MB version, the T2, for around £65 inc VAT. DFI says the performance of the two cards is very similar, but at time of going to press we were unable to obtain a T2 sample so could not verify this.

Installation of the Xabre 400-T3 is simple. However, in addition to the driver you have to install a software utility called 3D Wizard that controls full-scene anti-aliasing.

Once that is done it runs surprisingly well for a £73 card, and we got almost exactly the same test results as the more expensive Asus V9180 MX440. That's quite impressive power and the DirectX 8.1 part of 3Dmark 2001 worked flawlessly too.

The 400-T3 is a very good budget graphics card by any standard, particularly if you regularly buy DirectX 8.1 games.

SPECS

• Core 250MHz
• Ramdac 375MHz
• 128MB memory running at 500MHz
• Memory bandwidth 8Gbps
• Outputs: VGA, DVI, TV-out
• DirectX 8.1
• OpenGL 1.3
• AGP 3.0 compatibility (2x, 4x, 8x)

DETAILS
Price: £73 (£62.13 ex VAT)

Contact:Aventi 0870 794 2025
www.dfi.com