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Gigabyte Radeon X300 Review |
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Written by Phyro
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Saturday, 02 October 2004 |
Legion Hardware has reviewed the Gigabyte Radeon X300 graphic card. Unfortunately, Gigabyte is marketing their Radeon X300 product as a real low-end solution. The card features no active cooling what so ever, there is a moderate sized heatsink over the GPU which makes up the entire cooling setup of this Radeon X300 graphics card. Naturally when overclocking, any graphics card is going to generate more heat and therefore passive cooling just won’t do. However, this did not stop me from making a quick modification to the Gigabyte Radeon X300.
 Gigabyte Radeon X300 Review
The Gigabyte Radeon X300 may not have been quite the overclocking monster that the PowerColor variant was, but it’s still got plenty of head room. The PowerColor Radeon X300 managed an impressive 195MHz core overclock. Although the Gigabyte version was far from bettering this result, it still produced an impressive 115MHz core overclock with passive cooling. When testing with a much larger heatsink and fan the results improved, bringing the overall result to 135MHz. This Gigabyte card is going to struggle to reach the frequencies met by the PowerColor Radeon X300. However, keep in mind overclocking results can drastically fluctuate from one card to another.
Overclocking aside, the performance of this Gigabyte Radeon X300 was excellent, as it easily met the standard set by PowerColor. Priced at $140 the Gigabyte Radeon X300 is clearly a low-end Radeon graphics card with the added bonus of PCIe support. Although this graphics card is a big step up from the Intel 915G GMA900 graphics engine, it is still nothing outrageous. While it is much more capable at playing a wide range of games, it is still not designed with the gamer in mind. Despite the fact that Gigabyte is shipping the card with 256MB of memory using a 128-bit memory bus, it’s still not a frame rate killer.
Assuming the Radeon X300 GPU’s overclocking performance is consistent, I feel Gigabyte should have produced a third card. This third Gigabyte Radeon X300 graphics card could come at a slight price premium, as it would feature a decent cooling setup and maybe even higher rated memory chips. This would certainly not be the first modified graphics card Gigabyte has ever sold, as they shipped their GeForce FX5500 card with boosted memory and core frequencies.
Overall I am pleased with the performance of the Gigabyte Radeon X300 256MB and although it's not a monster, it gets the job done for roughly $130. I feel the Radeon X300 is better value than the X600 series, simply due to the much lower price tag that these graphics cards have begun retailing at. With such impressive overclocking potential, I believe with the right cooling some users may reach Radeon X600 performance. After all, with the standard cooling setup, which is very basic, I was not far off achieving this.
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