Consumer Electronics Show 2004 Day 2 - VIA's new Gaming Console

Under the Hood

From the specs alone you should realize that we're not talking about a very powerful gaming machine, but if you compare it to the Celeron 733 and the NV2A in the Xbox the system isn't exactly gutless. The motherboard in the ApeXtreme is produced by VIA and occupies the right side of the chassis.

On the motherboard there are three major chips - the VIA C3 processor, the CM400 North Bridge, and the VIA DeltaChrome S8 GPU. The CM400 North Bridge supports up to DDR400 memory, although Apex will determine whether they will use DDR333 or DDR400 memory in the shipping product. The CM400 also features a 200MHz FSB connection to the C3 processor, offering 1.6GB/s of bandwidth between the CPU and North Bridge.

The interesting chip is the VIA DeltaChrome S8 GPU, which is the same GPU that is beginning to ship on add-in cards within a month. The GPU is an 8 pipeline design much like the R300, and features full DirectX 9.0 pixel and vertex shader pipelines. The GPU features support for both 24-bit and 16-bit floating point values in the pixel shader pipeline. The GPU does not have support for the upcoming Pixel Shader 3.0 spec, which is a part of DirectX 9.1. The GPU on the motherboard is clocked at the same speed as the add-in cards at 300MHz, and it can be paired with anywhere from 64 - 256MB of on-board DDR memory.

The current prototype features 64MB of DDR memory on-board although the shipping version may feature more depending on the market price of memory. The memory clock on the desktop DeltaChrome S8 is 300MHz and although it could be that high on the ApeXtreme, the final decision will come closer to the shipping date. The GPU has a single 128-bit memory controller to drive up to 8 chips on the board (the motherboard itself cannot physically accommodate more than 8 chips).

The VIA CM400 chipset does actually have an integrated S3 graphics core that offers significantly less performance than the DeltaChrome S8; an integrated graphics version of the ApeXtreme may eventually be launched as more of a Home Theater PC box but Apex may want to re-evaluate how 'Xtreme' it is after that.

The ApeXtreme is at least a couple of months away from retail availability and during that time a number of the specifications may change. Apex is shooting for a MSRP of $399 for the ApeXtreme at launch.