The card
The Xabre600 comes on an eye-catching black PCB, complete with a polished gold heat sink. The leather jacket/gold medallion look is new for SiS, but we'll see just how tough this card is a little later on.

Pimp, baby Thankfully, the Xabre400's whiny, annoying fan hasn't carried over to the Xabre600. The Xabre600's GPU fan is no louder than what you'd expect to find on cards sporting ATI and NVIDIA chips, and it's certainly a lot quieter than Abit's funky new OTES.

Given the 0.13-micron manufacturing process, and the lack of any thermal interface material between the GPU and heat sink, I have to wonder how well the Xabre600 would do with a good passive cooling solution. GPU fans aren't loud, but it would be interesting to see if you could use a passive heat sink with some good heat sink paste and not have to sacrifice any clock speed, stability, or image quality with the Xabre600.

Where's the RAM? It's been a while since I last saw a graphics card with memory on only a single side of the PCB, but the Xabre600 manages to keep all the chips on one side with this 64MB card.

Memory chips apparently rated at 2.8ns SiS has gone with new BGA memory chips on the Xabre600, which should help the card hit higher memory clock speeds. Apparently, the chips are rated to 2.8ns, though I can't find an official part number that exactly matches the chips.

The 301 companion chip Like the Xabre400, the Xabre600's multi-monitor and TV output is handled by SiS' own 301 video chip. The Xabre600 actually works just fine without the 301 companion chip, you just don't have access to DVI and video outputs, which some low-end cards and integrated motherboards may not even need.

Everything you'd expect for output ports The Xabre600 features all the usual suspects on the port back plane. There are VGA, S-Video, and DVI ports to play with, and since this is a mid-range part, I really can't justify ragging on SiS for there being only one DVI output. Since all I've tested is a reference card, I can't comment on whether third party board manufacturers will be including DVI to VGA adapters with their Xabre600 cards. Given the card's rather sparse multimonitor features, I wouldn't expect it.