X1300 REVIEW X1300PRO BENCHMARK X1300 PRO OVERCLOCK

X1300 REVIEW X1300PRO BENCHMARK X1300 PRO OVERCLOCK
Posted:2006-05-13 By hardware review Number of View:18570
X1300 REVIEW X1300PRO BENCHMARK X1300 PRO OVERCLOCK By :hardware review Posted:2006-05-13 xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source x1300 review x1300pro benchmark x1300 pro overclock Video cards have evolved exponentially over the last few years. It\'s hard to imagine that it was merely 5 years ago that 3DFX, the founder of the modern 3D graphics card, was bought up by NVIDIA. It\'s harder to imagine in my way of thinking that the best video card of 2000, the Geforce 2 GTS would be considered less noteworthy than the lowest integrated video card chipset available today. What would be considered the lowest performing card available today would have been the highest end card back in 2000. ATI has been making video cards for over 20 years. They recently celebrated their 25th birthday. Recently they\'ve been in a bit of a quandary with issues delaying their next-generation architecture, the RADEON X1K series. One side benefit of the delay has been the repositioning of the performance and value parts to launch at the same time as the high-end video card, the RADEON X1800. The value part of the equation is called the X1300, and it comes in two configurations the X1300 Pro and x1300XT. Today, ATI is launching their last video card of 2005, the A-I-W version of the x1300XT. Let\'s take a look at what it has to offer and see if it warrants your hard earned dollars.   The A-I-W 2006 PCI Express Edition card is similar in many respects to a standard X1300 Pro in look and layout with a couple of exceptions noted below. The card is slightly longer than the ASUS X1300 Pro I have in the test labs, due to the inclusion of the Microtune TV Tuner. The cooling fan covers the VPU and the heatsink covers the majority of the rest of the video card. Card Front Card rear The A-I-W 2006 PCI Express card is of course a PCI Express native card. Early NVIDIA cards required a bridge chip to operate on the new bus, but all ATI cards were PCI Express native from the beginning. One advantage of being built on the 90nm process is the decreased power and heat requirements, allowing the A-I-W to operate without more power than the PCI Express x16 slot provides. The input and output bracket on the card is much like the A-I-W X1800XL\'s I/O. The card has two connectors, one for the TV antenna or cable antenna hook up and one for the FM radio antenna (not included with the card I received), a dongle to attach the input output block and VGA connector and the TV Out. I/O Side view of I/O One thing ATI hasn\'t changed on their A-I-W cards in a long time is the Theater chip they use. The Theater 200 was first introduced with the RADEON 9700 Pro, but it provides most of the features that a video card needs for video decoding today. I\'m sure in 2006 ATI will introduce another chip to replace the Theater 200 in A-I-W cards, but today all A-I-W cards sport this chip. A-I-W 2006 PCI Express Edition Video card Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 Input and Output Dongle VGA and Input Output connector FM Radio Antenna ATI traditionally has included excellent bundles with their All-In-Wonder products and the bundle for the A-I-W 2006 PCI Express Edition is no exception. ATI includes Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 bundle a $99 retail value. Adobe Premiere Elements is a video editing software replacing the Pinnacle Studio and Matchware Mediator of previous ATI A-I-W bundles. ATI includes Photoshop Elements with their new X1800XL A-I-W but only includes Premiere Elements with the 2006. Adobe Premiere Elements Adobe Premiere Elements CD The hardware bundle of the A-I-W 2006 is interesting to say the least. Most A-I-W cards come with a remote control, which ATI coins Remote Wonder (II, Plus or Pro), A-I-W 2006 does not come with a Remote Wonder, but there is a special offer for 1/2 price to purchasers of the 2006 version of the A-I-W. With the other included accessories I think this is a fair compromise, as many users don\'t use the remote controls at all. Input/Output dongle Breakout Box The input dongle attaches to the rear of the A-I-W 2006. Here you attach the input and output attachments to the card and a second monitor (VGA connector) if you want to. ATI has moved their 2nd VGA connector to the dongle to make room on the PCB for an FM antenna. ATI did not include the antenna with the box I received for the review card but the FM antenna should be included in the retail box. 0.09nm low-k process 105 million transistors DirectX 9.0c support Pixel Shader 3.0 Vertex Shader 3.0 HDR AVIVO PCI Express x16 256MB GDDR3 450MHz Core Clock 400MHz Memory Clock 3Dc Microtune 2121 Tuner Multimedia Center 9.12 When ATI designed the X1K series they targeted the 0.09 nanometer low-k process from TSMC. Dave Orton mentioned in a conference call that they probably couldn\'t hit their targets for the x1800XT with the 0.11 nanometer process they used with previous generations of video cards. The X1300 has 105 million transistors, making it the first mainstream card with over 100 million transistors to be built. The previous mainstream card, the x600 pro had 56 million transistors, meaning the x1300 doubles the previous generation in transistor count. The key features of the X1300 include full support for Microsoft\'s DirectX 9.0c API including Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0. ATI calls their X1K series "Shader Model 3.0 done right." I won\'t go into the politics of that statement besides the fact that the X1300 has better performance than a 6200 or a 6200 with Turbo Cache in general and the architecture of the R5xx series has better overall dynamic branching performance, but the fact is NVIDIA released their SM 3.0 cards over a year before ATI released theirs. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range lighting. The dynamic range is the ratio between the lightest and darkest part of the picture. A human eye can distinguish between a range of about 30,000 to 1. The problem is, today\'s computer monitors are based upon 8-bit per component color, giving a maximum range of 255NULL. To compensate, game developers use HDR to give the effect of natural light. Games that use HDR include Splinter CellNULL Tomorrow, Half Life 2 Lost Coast and others. The X1300 has 4 pixel shader pipelines and a clock speed of 450MHz. This gives the A-I-W 2006 PCI Express Edition a theoretical fillrate of 1.8 Gigapixels a second. The A-I-W 2006 is based upon the X1300 standard edition with a slightly higher core clock speed. There are three models of X1300NULL X1300, the X1300 with HyperMemory and the X1300 Pro. The X1300 with HyperMemory has a core speed of 400MHz and 32-bit memory interface to 500MHz memory. The X1300 has a core clock speed of 400MHz and 128-bit memory interface to 400MHz memory. The x1300 Pro has a clock speed of 600MHz and 128-bit memory interface to 450MHz. There comes a point to where we need to make a change to our testing system and tests for video cards, and today is that time. While a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is a fine CPU by today\'s standards, few hardcore gamers will play on the Intel platform, preferring to use the AMD Athlon 64 platform. To that end, the new test platform consists of the fastest available AMD CPU today for the consumer market, the FX-57, 2GB of high speed DDR memory, 2 250GB hard disk drives in RAID 0, and a ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Our old test software was getting more than a little dated as well. Games like Serious SamNULL Second Encounter, Final Fantasy XI, Gunmetal, are dated today. Benchmarks like Aquamark 3 are also getting dated. Today we\'re changing the tests to Call of Duty 2 from Activision, Quake4 from iD Software, Doom 3 from iD, Far Cry, F.E.A.R. and 3DMark03/05. This should give a fair cross-section of the latest games out there today. The combination of a good FX-57 CPU and the increase in resolution to 1600x1200, should give a better idea of where the cards are bottlenecked compare to the last test platform. Test System AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 CPU 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR400 memory 2 250GB WD Caviar SATA HDDs Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard 560W PSU BenQ DVD+/-RW 16x Dual Layer DVD-ROM Test Software Doom 3 Timedemo 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 no AA no AF 4x AA 16x AF Quake 4 Custom demo 1024x768 32-bit, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF Far Cry 1024x768 32-bit, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF F.E.A.R. 1024x768 32-bit, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 no AA no AF, 4x AA 16x AF 3DMark05 3DMark03 x1300 Benchmark Doom 3 benchmark Quake 4 benchmark far Cry benchmark FEAR benchmark 3d mark 2005 benchmark 3dmark2003 benchmark xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source we would be happy to answer for your question . if you have suggestion or comment regarding this review our support would be glad to help just join our forum and ask u will get the best answer to discuss check our forum section :-) RATE THIS REVIEW 1 2 3 4 5    / 5   View Stat

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