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Review: S3's OmniChrome S4

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 30 October 2004, 00:00

Tags: S3 Graphics

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OmniChrome S4

Powered by DeltaChrome S4 at 325MHz, OmniChrome adds television capabilities to create a multimedia-able product, like ATI's All-In-Wonder, as outlined earlier.

Card
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Card rear
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Card
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The main TV capabilities are provided by a Philips FQ1216ME/I H-3 analogue tuner, somewhat standard on PAL and SECAM television-supporting computer hardware over the last few years. It's on its last legs though and likely to be phased out by S3 in the future, in favour of programmable analogue logic on a GPU and support from something like Microtune's silicon tuners. It can't do DVB-T digital terrestrial tuning in the U.K.

Techwell video capture processor
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The Techwell TW9905 is the video capture processor, handling a triplet of signal inputs for capture of composite, S-Video and component feeds. It also features a programmable synchronisation engine that the S4 can use while time-shifting input video. The ASIC can do scaling and filtering of TV signals in realtime, before passing them on to the far side of the ASIC's bus interface.

The hardware supports 480p/720p/1080i/1080p HDTV output via the DVI port and the S-Video port, powered by the Techwell, as well as up to 1600x1200 output on the same DVI port for a connected digital display. That means you can run a HDTV set and a regular monitor at the same time.

As you can see, on the backplane you have TV input from an antenna in PAL/SECAM countries, S-Video input to the Techwell processor, DVI/HDTV output from the DVI port, and the HDTV-capable S-Video output port.

The board's heatsink is a small affair with a fairly quiet fan, making an audible but unobtrusive noise throughout testing. What's most alarming about the physical layout and proportions of the board itself is that it's simply too tall for the chassis that it might find plenty of potential use inside. Shuttle's XPCs, at least the G5 chassis variant that I have to hand at the time of writing, can't accomodate it without masking off the back of the card with electrical tape, so that solder points on the rear of the card don't touch the drive cage. Even then, the card has to be physically bent slightly to fit. Here's a picture of the OmniChrome in a Shuttle XPC, with protective tape on the cage edge to stop the board shorting out.

Shuttle XPC fitment issues
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Products like OmniChrome are ripe for placement in a small form factor chassis, like Shuttle's XPC. However, the PCB's larger-than-life nature prevents safe, out-of-the-box installation in current XPC chassis', and no doubt SFF chassis' from a variety of other vendors too. Strange that the final PCB design wasn't tested in XPC-like environments, and ultimately quite disappointing.

Finally, the DRAMs are Samsung's K4D551638D TSOP2 DDR-I devices. Rated to 300MHz by virtue of being the TC33 variant, the board runs the modules at that speed for an effective 600MHz memory module clock. Modules on both the front and back of the PCB confirm that the board has 256MB of frambuffer memory, the K4D551638D DRAMs being 256Mbit devices and there's eight in total.

The OmniChrome was supplied as Club3D's retail package, so lets see what you get in that particular OmniChrome retail bundle.