HIS Radeon X1300 Pro Review

Introduction

Radeon X1300 Pro is the top graphics chip inside the latest low-end graphics chip family from ATI. We’ve got a 256 MB sample for this model from HIS and in this review we will be comparing its performance to other low-end graphic chips, especially Radeon X300 and GeForce 6200, and also with some mid-range chips (GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT) to see how is the performance of this HIS video card.

Figure 1: HIS Radeon X1300 Pro.

We’ve posted a complete article explaining what’s new on Radeon X1000 series, so we won’t be repeating here everything we have already explained there. The big news is that all chips from this series are finally supporting Shader 3.0 model (DirectX 9.0c).

ATI has three chips on Radeon X1300 family: X1300 Pro, X1300 and X1300 HyperMemory. X1300 Pro, the model that we reviewed, runs at 600 MHz and accesses its memory at 800 MHz (12.8 GB/s transfer rate) and has a suggested price of USD 149 for the 256 MB model. X1300 runs at 450 MHz and accesses its memory at 500 MHz, with a suggested price of USD 99 for the 128 MB version and USD 129 for the 256 MB version. And X1300 HyperMemory, which runs at 450 MHz and accesses its memory at 1 GHz, with a suggested price of USD 79.

HyperMemory simulates a 128 MB video card by using 96 MB of the system’s RAM memory as video memory. Read our tutorial on HyperMemory for more information on this subject. Even tough Radeon X1300 HyperMemory has only 32 MB on-board, it accesses its memory at 1 GHz, double the speed of the plain Radeon X1300, in order to compensate the difference in video memory size.

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison Table” the difference between this chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

We ran PowerStrip and the graphics chip was really running at 600 MHz and the memory was really running at 800 MHz.

You can see the Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB from HIS on Figures 2 and 3. As you can see, it uses the traditional cooler system from HIS, dubbed IceQ, which removes hot air from inside the PC, helping a lot on preventing overheating your PC.

Figure 2: HIS Radeon X1300 Pro IceQ 256 MB.

Figure 3: HIS Radeon X1300 Pro IceQ 256 MB, back view.

Let’s now take a closer look at the HIS Radeon X1300 Pro IceQ.