S3 Chrome 440 GTX Card
It has been a long while since we have tested any graphics card from the once dominant market leader, S3.  With their latest product, the Chrome 440 GTX, S3 is hoping to get a foot hold into the budget graphics market by offering a sub-$70 GPU to compete with the AMD and NVIDIA offerings we see here today. 

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 57

The Chrome 440 GTX GPU is a completely DirectX 10.1 compliant part that offers up some impressive specs including 32 unified shaders (though we don’t know much about how these shaders actually compare to the AMD’s or NVIDIA’s), 4 ROPs and a 64-bit memory bus. 

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 58

Here are the full specs of the two S3 options available based on this technology.  With a stated compute rate of 38.4 GFLOPs I am guessing that this card will indeed have trouble keeping up with the other competitors here today but let’s see if we are pleasantly surprised. 

The GPU does offer support for HD video / Blu-ray decode acceleration via the “ChromotionHD 2.0” technology though you will have to make sure you find DVD playback software that takes advantage of it. 

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 59

The card design is pretty standard for budget graphics cards and is low profile enough to fit in just about any chassis.

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 60

The back of the card holds half of the 256MB of GDDR3 memory.

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 61

S3 did complement the dual-link DVI output and VGA output with an HDMI connection that also supports audio pass through. 

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 62

GPUs Under $70 - HD 4550, HD 4350, Galaxy 9500 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX - Graphics Cards 63

Taking the covers off the GPU built around the 65nm technology we see a chip that looks larger than even the 9500 GT.  S3 didn’t provide us with an exact transistor count however.  We’ll jump into the benchmarks now to see how the Chrome 440 GTX can compete.

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