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PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 15 March 2006 |
Elite Bastards published a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory graphics card. When ATI launched their Radeon X1000 series of GPU's back in October, the focus of most was naturally upon the high-end part of the family, the Radeon X1800. This actually deflected somewhat from the fact that, for the first time, ATI had launched a top-to-bottom range of parts which exhibited the same basic feature set. In previous years, ATI's usual strategy was to use a cut-down version of a chip from their last generation of parts at the low-end, arguing that at this price range performance was more important than simply check-box features.
 PowerColor Radeon X1300 HyperMemory Review
In its most basic terms, you could quite easily consider the RV515 core that powers the Radeon X1300 as simply quarter of an R520, due to its featuring a single quad of pixel pipelines complemented by four texturing units and two vertex shaders. Each pixel shader unit within the core has the same ALU configuration and abilities as the rest of the Radeon X1000 series. The Ultra Threaded Despatch Processor used by R520 is also present in RV515, but again its abilities are a quarter those of its big brother, with it being capable of processing 128 threads here compared to 512 in the R520.
One area where RV515 does miss out over its more powerful siblings is with regard to the memory controller, the ring bus controller used in RV530 and R520 is absent here, replaced by a more traditional crossbar controller which is 64-bits in width in this instance. In terms of feature support the Radeon X1300 is largely identical to the rest of the Radeon X1000 series, from Shader Model 3.0 capabilities down to the ability to perform floating-point blending. The Radeon X1300 also features the same anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering abilities of the rest of the family.
Low-end graphics boards have often been the butt of many a joke from enthusiasts, and often quite rightly so. We've seen far too many boards hit store shelves that are more concerned with checking the marketing tick boxes than offering a satisfactory user experience for even the most casual of gamer. With that in mind, thank goodness PowerColor have bucked this trend here, by sticking to 128MB of decently specced RAM rather than any ridiculous notion of throwing 256MB or even 512MB of slow modules on a board, and backing it up with a highly clocked core paired with a half-decent stock cooler.
The design choices made for the Radeon X1300 HyperMemory are sensible and logical, and it shows in the performance numbers we've seen today. A resolution of 1024x768 is pretty playable to some extent on most of the current titles we've thrown at the board today, although naturally with some graphical settings turned down, and on some titles you should even be able to manage some level of anti-aliasing and/or anisotropic filtering without sacrificing too much speed. Of course, it should really be pointed out that from a pricing point of view, our comparison today is a little unfair.
With the Radeon X1300 HyperMemory retailing at around £15 more than the GeForce 7300 GS board we tested it against. However, if you're a gamer of any caliber and looking to spend as little as possible on a graphics board, take a look at the performance numbers of these two boards and tell me; isn't that extra £15 worth it? If you plan on playing any current game titles and are looking for a low-end board to facilitate that, if the Radeon X1300 HyperMemory fits into your budget then you should seriously consider giving it a whirl.
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