ATI Buyer's Guide, Part III: All Graphics Cards!

Powercolor Radeon X1300 Hypermemory 2

This board is very short and slim, and only takes up a single expansion slot. The memory is limited to 128 MB and a 64-bit memory bus, but the driver reports 512 MB of Hypermemory. In our testbed system, this virtual extension of the video memory by using the system memory also alleviated the drawback of the card's low memory bandwidth. Games such as Serious Sam 2 and Age of Empires definitely benefited from this solution when running at 1024x768. Still, the GPU doesn't have enough power for resolutions beyond that setting.

The fan cools only the GPU, while the memory modules don't receive any kind of cooling. The GPU supports Pixel Shader 3 and HDR rendering in combination with anti-aliasing. In the overall performance ranking, the Radeon X1300 with 128 MB was able to inch past the Radeon X1300 with 256 MB, but the card is still too slow for complex 3D games.

Powercolor's Radeon X1300 Hypermemory 2 sports one DVI output and one VGA connector, as well as a video-out jack.

The card ships with an S-Video-to-RCA adapter cable.

Powercolor's driver CD only contains ATI's reference driver.