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PowerColor Radeon X1300 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 19 June 2006 |
Dev Hardware shares a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1300 512MB PCIe graphics card. Sooner or later, everyone needs to upgrade the video in their machine. The Radeon X1300 is the entry level model to ATI's Radeon X1K series, which offers a better fundamental design and better performance than the old Radeon X series. PowerColor has four lines of cards in the Radeon X1K series. These are the Radeon X1300, X1600, X1800, and X1900. The fundamental differences between these cards are the number of pixel pipelines available for the card to communicate with the PCI Express bus, and an increasing bus speed. The entry level Radeon X1300 cards offer only four pixel pipelines.
 PowerColor Radeon X1300 512MB PCI-E Review
PowerColor has a number of different PCI Express cards available in their Radeon X1300 line. Today, we'll ne checking out the PowerColor Radeon X1300 512MB. This card has 512MB of 128-bit DDR2 memory, which is pretty impressive for an entry level card. The card itself isn't as big as one might expect. Neither is the cooler, for that matter. But based on the entry level simplicity of this card, along with the low speed frequencies of the GPU, this card doesn't need to be big nor have a huge cooling fan. Though, with a better cooling system this card could do a lot better at overclocking.
The PowerColor Radeon X1300 is basically the next generation of the Radeon X300. I'm quite happy with how this card performs in comparison to its ancestor, the Radeon X300. In all tests, the Radeon X1300 tremendously outperformed its counterpart, showing definite advancement in the right direction. Using ATITool, I did attempt to overclock this card to see if I could squeeze out any better performance. Before I could make any substantial increase, the card would give up on me. As I said earlier, though, with some better cooling I'm sure this card could overclock an amount actually worth mentioning.
Overall, this card fits into a weird spot. It's a bit pricey for an entry level card, even if it is an entry level card for the next generation. The Radeon X300 cards are still available on the market for about half the price of the Radeon X1300, but if you want to even pretend to play today's games, then you are going to need the Radeon X1300. If you want to move slowly into the next generation of video, and can't afford too big of a jump, then this card is the right one for you.
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