De jongens van Digit Life hebben de PowerColor Evil Kyro eens onder de loep genomen. De Kyro chip is de derde uit de PowerVR generatie van STMicroelectronics/Imagination Technologies. Qua prijs en prestaties moet de Evil Kyro concurreren met GeForce2 MX plankjes. Deze kaart beschikt over 32MB 6ns SDRAM en een AGP2X/4X interface. Zowel de core als het geheugen werken op 100MHz en zijn gesynchroniseerd. Het overklokken van de Kyro was niet zo succesvol; de kaart wilde niet verder dan 113MHz. Jammer dat de geheugen- en coreklok niet apart instelbaar zijn; 6ns geheugen draait namelijk standaard op 166MHz. De prestaties van de Evil Kyro blijven in alle benchmarks achter bij die van de GeForce2 MX. Verwacht wordt dat de Kyro dan ook geen directe concurrent voor nVidia wordt:
The company PowerColor has announced a completely new product both for users and for the company itself, it's somewhere unique considering both not wide availability and a special architecture of the KYRO. The card loses when fighting against its heaviest rival - NVIDIA GeForce2 MX in performance, but quite low price should help it to be called for: GeForce2 MX has just reached $90 and PowerColor EVIL KYRO costs much less now. But remember that KYRO-based cards lack for an integrated geometrical coprocessor (Hardware TCL).
Well, I could only say that these cards will be claimed for but they will hardly become popular. Considering the architecture I must notice that a 2-pipeline processor operating at 110 MHz nearly catches up with a 4-pipeline GeForce256 SDR (you all know that the GeForce2 MX is faster than the latter). This puts forward all advantages of tile architecture. However, it wasn't much beneficial for the KYRO. The only good is the fact that the card is on the same level as GeForce2 MX card. We will not probably see mass sales but I still hope for the price policy to get better and for the manufacturers to debug the drivers.
Lees het hele verhaal hier.