The ECS AG400 is a graphics card that is based on the SiS Xabre 400 GPU -- the first GPU to support the AGP 8X standard.

ECS has always been a Haven for innovation, and they've been proud to march out new products with the advent of bigger and better technologies. The AG400 continues in this tradition.

The AG400 is not designed to be a GeForce 4 "Titanium" killer. Rather, it is a mid-level product designed to compete with such products as the ATI Radeon 7500, and the Nvidia Geforce 4 MX.

The Xabre 400 supports DirectX 8.1 extensions, as well as AGP 8X, and is capable of supplying users with a comfortable level of pixel-pushing power.

The Xabre 400 also has another thing going for it: It is currently the only GPU on the market that supports the Pixel Shader 1.3 standard under DirectX 8.1. That actually puts it ahead of the nVidia NV17 and the ATI Radeon 7xxx series, whom require assistance from the CPU to handle Pixel Shader routines.

On the other hand, the Xabre 400 does not come with a Vertex Shader. That means users can expect some performance loss when a Vertex Shader is called for, and ends up being emulated in software. That said, the Xabre 400's target market would have been ill-served by the addition of a hardware Vertex Shader; the extra size and transistors would have inevitably increased the Xabre's price.

The ECS AG400 comes with a 250Mhz core, 64Mb of 250Mhz DDR memory (2.1GB/sec of bandwidth), and support for 8X AGP.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?