It's a fact of life that we reviewers thoroughly enjoy putting the latest high-end graphics cards through their paces and it is also a fact of life that the man in the street hates to spend over £100 on a PC upgrade, so here, in a spirit of public service, is a review of the Asus EAX1300Pro Silent which falls squarely at the budget end of the market.

Essentially, a Radeon X1300 chip is one quarter of an X1800, so it supports DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3 with four Pixel Shaders and two Vertex Shaders. That looks good on paper, however budget graphics cards inevitably end up using cheaper DDR2 memory, rather than the faster DDR3 that you find on a high-end card, so this X1300 Pro has the same 600MHz core speed that you find in an X1800 but the memory runs at an effective speed of 800MHz, rather than the 1.5GHz that you get with the X1800. In the event that you buy a regular, non-Pro X1300, the core and memory speeds are reduced even further.

The result, as here, is a budget graphics card that has fairly negligible performance and which only allows you to play games such as FarCry and Half Life 2 with a frame rate of less than 40fps unless you turn the quality settings way, way down low. The Asus will stand a serious overclock to 700MHz/955MHz which boosts the performance by 17 percent in 3DMark06, but it merely raises the frame rate from 'poor' to 'less poor'.

We can only speculate about Asus' motives for including a copy of King Kong in the package, as you would really want a decent graphics card to play this game and the X1300 Pro doesn't qualify for that epithet.

The EAX1300Pro earns its Silent tag by using the same passive heatsink that we have previously seen on a GeForce 7600GS and, while it works very effectively on the X1300 Pro, it seems like overkill. The heatsink uses a hinged design and when you open it out a chunk of the heatsink sticks out horizontally in the direction of your processor cooler.

The problem is that the Radeon X1300/1600/1800 family are hot chips that require a serious amount of cooling so this budget ATi card uses the same heatsink that you find on a mid-range Nvidia card and we can't see how this piece of engineering can fail to bump up the cost.

On the bright side it means that you can enjoy DVD movies on your PC without the annoyance of a droning graphics card, and when the time comes you have the option of upgrading to Windows Vista Premium safe in the knowledge that the Asus will be able to handle the Aero GUI.

Verdict
Asus has done its best to turn the sow's ear that is the Radeon X1300 Pro into a silk purse of a graphics card. It's managed to come up with a passively cooled budget card that overclocks like crazy yet sells for a low price, but there's no getting around the fact that it's simply not up to the job of proper gaming.

Company: Asus

Tags: video card geforce vertex shader directx pixel shader ati technologies advanced micro devices radeon