They're aimed more at the mainstream than ultimate-gaming-performance market, but one of VIA Technologies' S3 Graphics' two new PCI Express graphics processors boasts the highest clock speed of any GPU to date: The Chrome S27's core and memory run at 700MHz, yet the company says its 90-nanometer process technology is cool enough to permit silent, fanless graphics-card designs. Manufactured by Fujitsu, the S27 and slightly slower Chrome S25 (600MHz core, 400MHz memory) support 32- and 64-bit interfaces to DDR and DDR-2 memory, with the S27 also offering a 128-bit bus to DDR-3 plus chipset-agnostic, cable-free MultiChrome two- or three-card support on any motherboard with suitable PCI Express slots. The thrifty S25 uses AcceleRAM technology to bolster small on-card frame buffers with system memory.

Both chips feature eight pixel shaders and four vertex shaders with DirectX 9.0 Shader 2.0+ (not 3.0) support; 10-bit or 1,024-shade color component rendering; and 1080p and other HDTV modes component output with what S3 calls the Chromotion 3.0 programmable video engine, providing MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WMV 9 support with post-processing filters to enhance poor-quality video feeds and real-time effects processing for artistic applications. S3 has not released pricing or ship-date information yet.