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HIS Radeon X1300 512MB DDR2 PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Sunday, 25 June 2006 |
Bona Fide Reviews shares a review on the HIS Radeon X1300 512MB DDR2 PCIe graphics card. Unlike most HIS cards, this Radeon X1300 does not feature the IceQ cooler and instead uses a passive cooling solution. This is most likely because this card is not a part of the Turbo line of HIS cards meaning that it has received no overclock and comes at the normal Radeon X1300 speeds right out of the box. The core and memory speeds on this card are the typical 450MHz and 500MHz effective. The two advantages this Radeon X1300 has over the others is its 512MB DDR2 memory, double of the other cards, and its dual DVI outputs.
 HIS Radeon X1300 512MB DDR2 PCI-E Review
Taking the card out of the box gives us our first look at the large fanless heatsink used to cool this Radeon X1300. The heatsink covers a large majority of the card and hides the memory chips from plain view. At first look it seems that the heatsink cools the core and memory chips but after closer examination we find this is not the case. Unfortunately we weren't able to easily remove the heatsink due to it being fastened on by four plastic plugs where as the IceQ cooler is held on by easy-to-remove screws. Like all other PCI Express based Radeon X1300's, it doesn't require any additional power cords.
Looking at the benchmarks the slower core and memory speeds are apparent when running at lower quality settings. The Radeon X1300 Turbo cards both outperform this Radeon X1300. As predicted, the extra 256MB of memory on this card helps out a little when running higher quality settings but when running at these settings the overall frame rate is typically too low. Playing with low quality settings is silly on a card with the extra memory since you won't be fully utilizing the on-board memory so the question becomes at which resolution with high quality settings turned on does the card perform best.
Of course the benchmarks we run on our video cards are in some of the most stressful situations found within each game, meaning the results we came up with are essentially a worst case scenario. The overall average frame rate during playing will be higher then those reported in our benchmark results. Currently the HIS Radeon X1300 512MB card can be found for about $140. This price is quite expensive for a Radeon X1300 card. Comparatively, the HIS Radeon X1300 Turbo card with IceQ cooler can be found for $85. With this price difference, it is tough to recommend the 512MB card over the 256MB version.
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