S3 Chrome 400: freq., price & avail.

VIA’s graphic division announced that it took advantage of the CeBIT to make official alliances with two German companies: Qimonda, a memory manufacturer, and Memorysolution, a distributor. The latter will offer the S3 Chrome 400 in Europe starting in the second quarter which of course will be equipped with Qimonda GDDR2 or GDDR3.

Thanks to its partnerships, the American company now believes it is well placed to improve its market shares in the very competitive sector of low-key graphic solutions in Europe. This is a position that reminds us of other events since the launch of the Savage XP in 2002.

However, on paper the Chrome 430 and 440 are not unattractive. Engraved in 65nm by Fujitsu, they support the Shader Model 4.1 of DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 2.1, PCI-Express 2.0 and have ChromotionHD for video reading. On the other hand, the memory bus has a width of 64 bits.

The Chrome 430 GT is already on pre-order at GStore, the company’s on-line store that is trying to make up for the lack of manufacturer support since the launch of the Chrome S20.

With frequencies of 625 MHz for the GPU and 500 MHz for the 256 MB of GDDR2, the S3 tries to once again rival Nvidia and ATI in the entry level. While we can’t vouch for these numbers, we can say that the S3 should be aware of the current situation as this card is offered for $60 while the Radeon HD 3450 from ASUSTek, Sapphire, HIS and PowerColor are sold for $50 in the U.S.