XGI Volari 8300 128 MB 64-bit Review

The Volari 8300 Reference Board from XGI

On Figures 2 and 3 you can check Volari 8300 reference board from XGI. As you can see, this video card uses an active heatsink (i.e., with a fan).

Figure 2: XGI Volari 8300.

Figure 3: XGI Volari 8300, back view.

We removed the heatsink to take a look at the memory chip, and as you can see in Figure 4, this card uses two 512-Mbit memory chip.

Figure 4: The reviewed card without its heatsink.

This video card uses two DDR 512-Mbit 2.8 ns chips from Hynix (HHY5DS113222FM-28)to give it 128 MB of video memory (512 Mbits x 2 = 128 MB). These chips can run up to 700 MHz. Since this video card accesses the memory at 600 MHz there is a 17% headroom for memory overclocking inside the memory’s specifications. The problem, however, is finding a tool to overclock it, since PowerStrip software does not recognize this chip yet and the video driver doesn’t have any overclocking option.

Figure 5: 2.8 ns DDR memory chip used by XGI Volari 8300.