Intel i740 AGP with Sigma Designs Malibu DVD-accelerator
| Technical details | |
| Name: | i740 |
| Company: | Intel |
| Chipset: | Intel i740 (Auburn) at 55 MHz, REALmagic EM8220 MPEG-2 accelerator |
| Bus: | AGP 2x |
| RAM: | 8 MB SDRAM 10 ns 64 bit 110 MHz, 2 MB SDRAM on DVD upgrade |
| DAC: | integrated 220 MHz 32 bit |
| Connectors: | VGA |
| Direct3D: | 5 |
| OpenGL | 1.1 |
| Manufactured: | 1998 |
The Intel i740 was a 3D accelerator from Intel to promote the at this time new AGP bus. The on board SDRAM is for framebuffer only. For texturing the AGP bus is always used which offers half of the bandwidth compared to the on board memory. Then benchmarks showed that the PCI version performed faster in benchmarks. The cards performance is compareable with a Riva128.
Here the Video Module Interface of the i740 is used for a DVD accelerator card.
Intel i740 with DVD upgrade drivers
Sigma Designs Malibu DVD playback quality comparison video (with brief footage from The Fifth Element DVD):
My notes:
System used:
P2 233 MHz on i440LX chipset.
i740 AGP 8 MB SDRAM with Sigma Designs Malibu daughterboard with Realmagic EM8220 2MB, SB16
graphics mode 1024x768 24bit color depth
The decoder seems to have problems with the format of PAL 4:3 resolution.
If the movie is 16:9 with less vertical lines it seems to work.
Audio sounds as if capped with a low frequency.
Conversion Quality Setting in Windows was set to high though.
The daughterboard is mapped through the i740 resources.
Intel i740 performing in Unreal Tournament, 3DMark2000, 3DMark2001SE, XL-R8R:
