ATi X1300, Graphics Card

Price: 6375 (3 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM

Contact: Mediatech India. Tel: 9873186855E-mail: haresh@mediatechindia.com RQS# E25 or SMS 130325 to 9811800601

Even though ATi has now reclaimed the top spot, it's not

ignoring the mid-range buyers. The X1300 is an excellent card having 256 MB of

RAM, a core running at 600 MHz and is of course PCI-X based. Funnily enough, the

card slots right in between the card range from NVIDIA. While the 6600GT we

reviewed sometime back was selling for roughly Rs 9500, this card costs much

lesser at 6375 and offers almost similar performance. The card comes with three

different video out options. You have DVI, S-Video as well as the standard VGA

out. There was no DVI adapter bundled with the card though.

We used our standard test bed, AMD Athlon X2 4800+, ASUS

A8N-SLI, 1GB DDR400 RAM and a 120 GB 7200RPPM SATA drive. We ran all our tests

on this card at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 as the resolutions and the quality

setting was either no AA/AF or 2xAA/2xAF. Beyond these, we experienced framing

and the game was unplayable. Note that if you were to turn the resolution below

102x768, you might get absolute playability even at higher AA/AF levels. The

test results were impressive from a card at this price. It outdid the 6600 in

all tests except for Doom 3. But then, traditionally NVIDIA does better on the

Doom3 engine. Even though Quake 4 is based on Doom 3 engine, the ATi outdid the

6600 here. This again conforms to tradition as whenever the quality settings are

kept higher, the ATi cards have a lesser drop in performance than the NVIDIA

cards. Even with all this, don't expect any greatness from this card. It is

strictly entry level for gamers and will let you play with only some of the

quality settings in a setup.

Bottom Line: Excellent value

for the price. If you are looking at an entry level card for your PC, this one

should top your list.