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Though the X1300 is an entirely new entrant into the entry level market, for the suggested retail price, it does not deliver when compared to the street priced 6600GT. Though the card has a high clock speed, its small number of pipes in comparison to the 6600 GT cause a major bottleneck.

It is important to reiterate that the X1300 Pro we preview here was never intended to go head to head against a 6600GT. The $149 priced X1300 Pro was meant to be pitted against a lower end variant of the 6600 family, and Nvidia's upcoming DDR2 6600 will probably be in the exact ballpark range of the X1300's street price. We can expect to see lower street prices for the X1300 when it becomes widely available - prices hovering from $110 or so shouldn't be out of the question, but looking at the X1800XL's current street price of around $439 versus its $449 MSRP, it might take some time before the prices settle down. Right now the 6600GT has street prices ranging from $145-$199, so if the X1300 Pro hits stores at $149USD you can see how there's potential for direct comparison of the two cards.

The card comes in 256 MB variations, but with its poor performance anyways, that extra 128MB won't impact performance significantly. We can attribute the X1300's win in SM3.0 Splinter Cell to better optimization for the new Shader Model, and with the 6600's implementation being more than a year old, this is understandable.

It is unfortunate that the Pro variation of the 1300 does not come in a lower priced 128 MB flavor for the sake of easier comparison to Nvidia's 6600 GT or a cheaper variant of the 6600 family, so right now the performance numbers give Nvidia's 6600GT a clear win at the 1300 Pro's MSRP price point.

A feature of the X1300 that is not present on the 6600 GT is Adaptive Anti-Aliasing (Or Transparency AA in Nvidia's case) which may or may not be an important factor for potential buyers.

We are hoping to see more performance from updated driver releases, which should also fix some of the issues we saw in certain games. The X1000 family is so new that ATI hasn't had time to tweak the performance on each segment of the family, so we anticipate that the story can only look better as the drivers mature. We've seen this with pretty much any release by ATI or Nvidia.

Overall, the X1300 series is currently a letdown performance wise, and the people who end up owning this card will ultimately buy it for its feature set, rather than its performance. When the card is widely available, its prices will be lower and drivers will be more mature. Perhaps then we'll take another look and see how the card stacks up against its competitors in its street price class.