Sapphire X1300 XT review - PAGE 1

Introduction

With all the buzz surrounding the recent releases of ATI’s Radeon X1950 XT and Radeon X1950 XTX, other cards in ATI’s newly refreshed line up may have been overshadowed. For people unwilling to spend the ungodly amounts of money for bleeding edge technology, ATI also released cards for the mid-end and low-end of their video card spectrum. ATI’s Radeon X1650 PRO and Radeon X1300 XT will retail for $150 and $89 respectively. We’ll be looking at the Sapphire’s Radeon X1300 XT which finds itself in a glutton of new and old cards on the low end.

Sapphire’s Radeon X1300 XT will try to find its own place in an already crowded market of sub $100 video cards. ATI’s main competitor, NVIDIA, has their own line-up of sub $100 boards ranging from the GeForce 6600 to the GeForce 7300 GT. ATI has also reduced prices on old stock of their Radeon X1300 PRO and Radeon X1600 PRO boards - two cards which really failed to excite enthusiast and normal consumers alike. Be sure to also check out our review for the X1300 PRO here for some background information. Note that the performance differences between the X1300 PRO in this review and the previous review are due in part to the configuration changes (motherboard, ram, etc.) of the benchmarking systems and differing cores (RV515 and RV530).

The X1300 XT will only be released with the PCI express interface, so anyone with an aging AGP slot should be looking elsewhere (although there are AGP to PCI-E bridges available). Another choice Sapphire made with this card was to overclock it out of the box, labeling it an overclock edition, to possibly give it a small performance edge over the vanilla X1300 XT. So with the log jam of relatively cheap video cards on the market, ATI’s/Sapphire’s refresh will try to give the X1300 XT enough of a power boost to hoist it over its low end brethrens and NVIDIA competitor cards and hopefully not flounder just as its predecessors have.